If you follow music news, you’ll have read of late more than a couple stories about two former members of two highly influential bands—Jackie Fox of the Runaways and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Fox’s story of exploitation and sexual assault as a sixteen year-old rock star comes with all the usual public doubts about her credibility, and sadly represents the experience of so many women in the music business. Gordon’s numerous stories in her memoir Girl in a Band document her own struggles in punk and alt rock scenes that fostered hostility to women, in the band or no. The discussion of these two musicians’ personal narratives is compelling and necessary, but we should not lose sight of their significant contributions as musicians, playing perhaps the least appreciated instrument in the rock and roll arsenal—the bass. Members of bands that routinely become the subject of petitions to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Fox and Gordon represent just two of hundreds of women bass players, many thumping away in obscurity and no small number achieving success in indie, punk, metal, and jazz bands, as solo artists, or as sessions musicians. Gordon’s low end helped drive the sound of nineties alt-rock (see her with Sonic Youth at the top), and Fox’s basslines underscored seventies hard rock (with the Runaways above). Before either of them picked up the instrument, another hugely influential bassist, Carol Kaye, played on thousands of hits as a member of L.A.’s top flight session musicians, the Wrecking Crew. A trained jazz guitarist, Kaye’s discography includes Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots Were Made for Walking," the Beach Boy’s "California Girls," the Monkees "I’m a Believer," Joe Cocker’s "Feelin’ Alright"… and that’s just a tiny sampling. (See Kaye give Kiss’s Gene Simmons a bass lesson, above, and don’t miss a lengthy interview with her here.) Kaye could, and did, play almost anything; she is an exceptional—and exceptionally gracious—musician. And while few bass players can match her when it comes to musical range and ability, many share her talent for writing simple, yet unforgettable basslines that define genres and eras. Alongside Kim Gordon’s aggressively melodic bass playing in Sonic Youth, Kim Deal of the Pixies gave us massive 90s alt-rock hooks and, like Gordon, shared or took over vocal duties on some of the band’s biggest songs. (See them do "Gigantic" live in 1988 above.) Although they may not seem to have much in common, both Deal and Kaye mastered the art of simplicity, paring down what could have been overly busy basslines to only the most essential notes and rhythmic accents. (Deal discusses her approach in an interview here.) Like Kim Deal’s playing in the Pixies, Tina Weymouth’s bass in Talking Heads worked as both a rhythmic anchor and a propulsive engine beneath the band’s angular guitars and synths. (See her awesome interplay above with the band and guest guitarist Adrian Belew during the Remain in Light tour in Rome.) Weymouth not only comprised one half of the funkiest art rock rhythm section in existence, but she wrote what is perhaps the funkiest bassline in rock history with her own project Tom Tom Club’s "Genius of Love." It’s almost impossible to imagine what the 80s would have sounded like without Weymouth’s bass playing (though we could have lived without her dancing). No list of classic female bass players will ever be complete—there’s always one more name to add, one more bass riff to savor, one more argument to be had over who is over- and underrated. But it should provoke no argument whatsoever to point toward Meshell Ndegeocello as not only one of the most talented bass players, but one of the most talented musicians period of her generation. See her and band above play "Dead End" live on KCRW. Unlike most of the players above (except perhaps Carol Kaye), Ndegeocello is a highly technical player, but also a very tasteful one. Much of her music flies under the radar, but most people will be familiar with her cover of Van Morrison’s "Wild Nights" with John Cougar Mellencamp and her neosoul hit "If That’s Your Boyfriend." Again, this is only the briefest, smallest sampling of excellent female bass players—in rock, jazz, soul, etc. An expanded list would include players like Melissa Auf der Maur, Esperanza Spalding, and many more names you may or may not have heard before. One you probably haven’t, but should, is the name Tal Wilkenfeld, an Australian prodigy who has played with Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, the Allman Brothers, and Jeff Beck. (See her absolutely kill it in a performance with Beck above from 2007.) Like Carol Kaye many decades before her, Wilkenfeld made her name at a very young age, playing guitar in jazz clubs, and quickly became a highly in-demand player called—at age 21—"the future of bass." Are there any other women players out there deserving of the title, or of inclusion in a bass playing Hall of Fame? Let us know in the comments, and include a link to your favorite live performance. Related Content: Meet Carol Kaye, the Unsung Bassist Behind Your Favorite 60s Hits Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock Hear Isolated Tracks From Five Great Rock Bassists: McCartney, Sting, Deacon, Jones & Lee The Story of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music History in 8 Minutes Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/7-female-bass-players-who-helped-define-modern-music.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. More than a half decade later, the novel remains one of the most widely-read books in American classrooms. And students still write the 89-year-old author, requesting photographs and autographs. Occasionally, they get a little more than they bargained for. Take, for example, a student named "Jeremy," who wrote Lee in 2006 and requested a photo. In return, he got something more valuable and enduring: some pithy life advice. The letter Harper sent to Jeremy reads as follows: 06/07/06 Dear Jeremy I don’t have a picture of myself, so please accept these few lines: As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, "I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal." (Signed, ‘Harper Lee’) Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was just released last week — 55 years after her debut. You can read the first chapter (and also hear Reese Witherspoon read it aloud) here. via Letters of Note Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content: Stephen King Writes A Letter to His 16-Year-Old Self: "Stay Away from Recreational Drugs" Harper Lee on the Joy of Reading Real Books: "Some Things Should Happen On Soft Pages, Not Cold Metal" 74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/harper-lees-important-life-advice.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Once upon a time, Joe Strummer wrote and directed Hell W10, a silent black & white film featuring the music of The Clash. And the Pixies’ Black Francis created a driving, jangling soundtrack for one of Weimar Germany’s finest silent films, The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). If the melding of vintage and modern aesthetics appeals, then get ready for Gutterdämmerung. Directed by the Belgian-Swedish visual artist Björn Tagemose, Gutterdämmerung promises to be "the loudest silent movie on earth," with Iggy Pop, Grace Jones and Henry Rollins playing starring roles. BEAT describes the premise of the film as follows: The film is set in a alternate reality where God has saved the world from sin by taking from mankind the Devil’s Evil Guitar. As a result the Earth has been cleansed into a puritan world with no room for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (boo). [Queue] Iggy Pop as the punk angel Vicious, who secretly sends the Evil Guitar back to Earth, unleashing all manner of sin upon mankind. Things get even crazier when Henry Rollins, as the puritan priest, coerces a girl to destroy the guitar, a quest that see’s her face the most evil rock ‘n’ roll bastards on the planet. Grace Jones plays the only person capable of controlling all the testosterone of all the no good rock ‘n’ rollers - obviously. The director and cast set the scene a little more in the "launch video" above. To be honest, the video feels a bit like a spoof, making me wonder whether this is all a big put on. But they’ve certainly set up a respectable web site where, each week, they’ll announce other personalities starring in the film. So, stay tuned… via Pitchfork Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content: Watch the German Expressionist Film, The Golem, with a Soundtrack by The Pixies’ Black Francis The Clash Star in 1980’s Gangster Parody Hell W10, a Film Directed by Joe Strummer 101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/iggy-pop-henry-rollins-grace-jones-to-star-in-gutterda%cc%88mmerung-the-loudest-silent-movie-on-earth.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I try to catch the Noir City film festival whenever it comes through Los Angeles, not just because it uses the Egyptian, one of my favorite theaters in town, but because it comes curated by the experts. You’d have a hard time finding any group more knowledgeable about film noir than the Film Noir Foundation, who put Noir City on, and anyone in particular more knowledgeable than its founder and president, "noirchaeologist" Eddie Muller. The talks he sometimes gives before screenings give a sense of the depth and scope of his knowledge of the genre; you can sample it in a video clip where he introduces Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (above) at last year’s Noir City Seattle. You may remember Muller’s name from our post featuring his list of the 25 noir films that will stand the test of time. I do recommend Noir City as the finest context in which to watch any of them, but you don’t have to wait until the festival comes to your town to see a few, such as Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour. (2nd and 3rd on this page.) They and various other important pieces of the film noir canon have fallen into the public domain, making them easily and legally viewable free online. Watch The Hitch-Hiker that way after you’ve seen Muller’s introduction, and you can replicate a little of the Noir City experience in the comfort of your own home. Other public-domain noirs of note include Orson Welles’ The Stranger, a subject of controversy among Welles fans but one about which Noir of the Week says "you couldn’t make a better choice if you’re looking for a conventional, fantastic looking film noir thriller." And as the name of the festival implies, when we talk about such a highly urban storytelling tradition as noir, we very often talk about the city as well. Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. includes as a particularly vivid depiction of 1940s Los Angeles and one of the more dramatic uses of the beloved Bradbury Building in cinema history. These five pictures should put you well on your way to a stronger grasp of film noir, and no doubt get you ready to explore our list of 60 free noir films online. Related Content: 25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by "Noirchaelogist" Eddie Muller The 5 Essential Rules of Film Noir Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-5-best-noir-films-in-the-public-domain.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Smashing Pumpkins’ leader—and sole remaining original member—Billy Corgan is a man of many opinions, most of which I find easy to ignore. But in one of his recent made-for-headlines quotes, he referred to fellow nineties alt-rock superstars Radiohead as "the last band that did anything new with the guitar." It is, of course, impossible to quantify this not-especially controversial statement, but I haven’t found it easy to dismiss either. After Radiohead’s first three albums, we had maybe a solid decade of musicians looking back to a time before electric guitars to find an alternate path forward (as Radiohead themselves largely traded guitars for synthesizers). That said, in the years since Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OK Computer, Thom Yorke and band’s breakout song, "Creep," has successfully translated to so many unplugged arrangements that they deserve credit for writing a universally beloved new standard as well as reinventing rock guitar—even if they’d prefer we all forget their first, angst-ridden hit. There’s Mexican actor Diego Luna’s powerful rendition, as the animated troubadour Manolo in Jorge Gutierrez’s Book of Life. There’s Tori Amos’ characteristically intense, live voice and piano version; there’s Amanda Palmer on ukulele, Damien Rice on acoustic guitar, and Korn—believe it or not—in a very tasteful acoustic cover. Now we can add to these the bring-down-the-house swing arrangement at the top of the post, with jazz singer Haley Reinhart, who slides from playful vamp to an almost gospel crescendo, and all, we’re told, on a first take. This jazz-age cover comes to us from pianist Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, a touring collection of ensemble musicians that Bradlee assembles to re-interpret famous pop songs. He previously recorded a sweet, classic soul cover of "Creep" with Karen Marie, above. The list of other Postmodern Jukebox covers ranges from a "Sad Clown with a Golden Voice" version of Lorde’s "Royals" to a klezmer take on Jason Derulo’s club anthem "Talk Dirty" (with the song’s 2 Chainz rap in Yiddish). We previously featured a New Orleans jazz rendition of "Sweet Child O’ Mine," with stage actress and singer Miche Braden. As Ayun Halliday wrote of the Guns n’ Roses’ reimagining, the Radiohead covers above are "not without gimmick, but it’s a winning one." Related Content: Guns N’ Roses "Sweet Child O’ Mine" Retooled as 1920s New Orleans Jazz Patti Smith’s Passionate Covers of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Jefferson Airplane & Prince Listen to a New Album Featuring Tom Waits Songs in Hebrew (2013) Hear 38 Versions of "September Song," from James Brown, Lou Reed, Sarah Vaughan and Others Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/radioheads-creep-performed-in-a-vintage-jazz-age-style.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Blank on Blank returns with an animation of another lost interview from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive. This time, they’re breathing new life into a conversation Terkel had with Hunter S. Thompson in 1967 — soon after HST published his groundbreaking piece of Gonzo journalism: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. The book, built upon the foundations of a 1965 article Thompson wrote for The Nation (read it online here) gave us a glimpse inside "a world most of us would never dare encounter," wrote The New York Times in its original review. Thompson tells Terkel what he learned from that (sometimes harrowing) experience above. You can hear the complete Terkel-Thompson interview here. Related Content Hunter S. Thompson Gets Confronted by The Hell’s Angels 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   http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/new-animation-hunter-s-thompson-talks-with-studs-terkel-about-the-hells-angels-the-outlaw-life.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 exponential democratization of digital technology every year has led to a wealth of video essays and fan films from bedroom auteurs, the likes of which would have been unimaginable even five years ago  To wit: this beautiful tribute to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s anime god, and his Studio Ghibli. A typical fan video would have edited together a "best of" clip show, using a song to link the scenes. But a Paris-based animator named "Dono" has gone one step further and created a tribute where scenes and characters from Miyazaki all frolic about a 3-D modeled world, where the bathhouse from Spirited Away is rendered in all of its glory, and Totoro’s catbus is only a few blocks away from Kiki’s Delivery Service, and next door to Porco Rosso’s favorite hangout. Even Lupin III, not Miyazaki’s original creation, but who starred in the director’s first feature, gets a look in. It’s very charming, and judging from Dono’s other work on his Vimeo channel, a huge step up and no doubt a labor of love. And here’s the other thing about this seamless work of fan art. In the past, the software and the computing power needed to make such a film would have been both prohibitively expensive and the domain of a design company. For this tribute, three of the four software programs named in its creation-Gimp, Blender, and Natron-are free and open-source, and run on a laptop. (The fourth, Octane, costs a little bit of money.) via Vice Related Content: French Student Sets Internet on Fire with Animation Inspired by Moebius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyazaki The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki The Delightful TV Ads Directed by Hayao Miyazaki & Other Studio Ghibli Animators (1992-2015) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/hayao-miyazakis-universe-recreated-in-a-wonderful-cgi-tribute.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

There’s no way around it, German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is incredibly difficult to understand. And yet, his work, like few others since Plato, has been reduced over and over again to one idea—the "Hegelian dialectic" of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." As a 1996 beginner’s guide to Hegel phrases it, this "triadic structure" is the "organic, fractal form" of the effusive thinker’s logic. The formula is what most lay people learn of Hegel, and often no more. So it may come as a surprise to learn that Hegel himself never used these terms in this way. As Gustav E. Mueller has written of this "most vexing and devastating legend," Hegel "does not use this ‘triad’ once" in all twenty volumes of his complete works, nor "does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth century." So where does the idea come from? From Hegel’s interpreters, who—baffled by his "obscurity" and "peculiar terminology and style"—have imposed all sorts of clarifying (or distorting) concepts on his work. In his animated School of Life video introduction above, Alain de Botton begins with the problem of Hegel’s famous difficulty. Hegel’s writing has generally been thought of as "horrible"—obscure, overstuffed, tangled, "confusing and complicated when it should be clear and direct." I can’t speak to his German, but this certainly seems to be the case in English. Yet, whether anyone can say what a philosopher’s work "should be" seems like a matter of interpretive bias. How can we, after all, separate a thinker’s ideas from his or her prose, as though these things can exist independently of each other? De Botton continues with another should: He tapped into a weakness of human nature: to be trustful of grave-sounding, incomprehensible prose. This has made philosophy much weaker in the world than it should be, and it’s made it much harder to hear the valuable things that Hegel has to say to us. The video goes on to make a short list of "a small number of lessons" we can take from Hegel. I’ll leave it to you to find out what de Botton thinks those are. Some may find in his tidy summations a useful guide to Hegel’s thought, others a further oversimplification of a philosophy that deliberately resists easy reading. No doubt, whatever we make of Hegel, we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that his thinking easily boils down to a "Hegelian dialectic." For those seeking to understand why his work has been so influential despite, or because of, its legendary difficulty, there are numerous resources online. One might start with "Hegel by Hypertext," a huge compendium of introductory and biographical material, analysis, discussion, links, and Hegel’s own writing. Hegel.net collects excerpts and full texts of the philosopher’s work in both German and English, as well as "works of Hegel’s 19th century followers" on both the right and left. Hegel’s most famous interpreter was of course Karl Marx, and you will find in every archive a number of commentaries and critiques from Marx himself and several Marxist thinkers. The Hegel Society of America also gives us articles on Hegel from a range of thinkers across the political spectrum. Finally, we should attempt, as best we can, to grapple with Hegel’s own words, and we can do so with all of his major work on line in translation at the University of Adelaide’s eBooks library. For two very different ways of reading Hegel, see professor Rick Roderick’s lecture on "Hegel and Modern Life" and Slavoj Žižek’s lecture on "The Limits of Hegel," above. And should you feel that any or all of these interpreters misrepresent the formidable German philosopher, have a listen to the lecture below by Dr. Justin Burke entitled, appropriately, "Everything You Know About Hegel is Wrong." Find courses on Hegel in our collection of 140 Free Online Philosophy Courses, and texts by the philosopher on our list of 135 Free Philosophy eBooks. Related Content: 6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated "School of Life" Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life Download Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Modern Thought (1960) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/an-animated-intro-to-g-w-f-hegel.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

We live in an age of mash ups. A few years ago some malcontent came up with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Our cities are teeming with food trucks hawking Korean tacos and ramen burgers. And chess boxing is apparently a thing. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that some evil genius would merge the most quotable movie of the past 20 years, The Big Lebowski, with William Shakespeare. The resulting book, written by Adam Bertocci, is called Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, and it does a surprisingly good job of capturing the language of the Bard while staying true to the original movie. The author reportedly wrote the first draft of the book in a single sleepless weekend. An impressive feat that the author dismisses in an interview with CNN that you can see above. "Anybody could, given the lack of a social life," deadpans Bertocci, "take a weekend with a movie they admired and an author that they knew well and make a similarly lengthy mash up of it." In Bertocci’s fevered reworking (read the first 3 scenes for free here), the Dude is recast as The Knave. His belligerent best friend is Sir Walter of Poland. The hapless Donnie is Sir Donald of Greece. Knox Harrington, Mauve’s gratingly giggly conceptual artist friend, is in this version a tapestry artist. And of course, Da Fino, the PI, who shadows the Dude in the movie, is listed simply as Brother Seamus. But where Bertocci really shines is in his clever appropriation of Shakespearean language. The film’s copious profanity has been replaced with more Bard-worthy epithets like "rash egg" or "varlet." The word "verily" peppers the Knave’s dialogue as the word "like" peppers the Dude’s. And when Walter waxes poetic about the rules of bowling, he does so in iambic pentameter. To get a sense of the differences, compare the clip above from the movie with the Bard-ofied text of the same scene below. THE KNAVE’s house. Enter THE KNAVE, carrying parcels, and BLANCHE and WOO. They fight. BLANCHE Whither the money, Lebowski? Faith, we are as servants to Bonnie; promised by the lady good that thou in turn were good for’t. WOO Bound in honour, we must have our bond; cursed be our tribe if we forgive thee. BLANCHE Let us soak him in the chamber-pot, so as to turn his head. WOO Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul. They insert his head into the chamber-pot. BLANCHE What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cool’d thy head; think now upon drier matters. WOO Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski? THE KNAVE Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again. WOO What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations. They again insert his head into the chamber-pot. BLANCHE Trifle not with the fury of two desperate men. Long has thy wife sealed a bond with Jaques Treehorn; as blood is to blood, surely thou owest to Jaques Treehorn in recompense. WOO Rise, and speak wisely, man—but hark; I see thy rug, as woven i’the Orient, A treasure from abroad. I like it not. I’ll stain it thus; to deadbeats ever thus. He stains the rug. THE KNAVE Sir, prithee nay! BLANCHE Now thou seest what happens, Lebowski, when the agreements of honourable business stand compromised. If thou wouldst treat money as water, flowing as the gentle rain from heaven, why, then thou knowest water begets water; it will be a watery grave your rug, drown’d in the weeping brook. Pray remember, Lebowski. THE KNAVE Thou err’st; no man calls me Lebowski. Hear rightly, man!—for thou hast got the wrong man. I am the Knave, man; Knave in nature as in name. BLANCHE Thy name is Lebowski. Thy wife is Bonnie. THE KNAVE Zounds, man. Look at these unworthiest hands; no gaudy gold profanes my little hand. I have no honour to contain the ring. I am a bachelor in a wilderness. Behold this place; are these the towers where one may glimpse Geoffrey, the married man? Is this a court where mistresses of common sense are hid? Not for me to hang my bugle in an invisible baldric, sir; I am loath to take a wife, or she to take me until men be made of some other mettle than earth. Hark, the lid of my chamber-pot be lifted! Personally, I’m hoping that the Globe Theatre stages a version of this. While you are waiting for that to happen, you can see another scene from Two Gentlemen from Lebowski above where The Knave and Sir Walter commiserate about a rug, which was besmirched by a "most miserable tide." Related Content: The Big Lebowski Reimagined as a Classic 8-Bit Video Game Watch the Coen Brothers’ TV Commercials: Swiss Cigarettes, Gap Jeans, Taxes & Clean Coal 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-two-gentlemen-of-lebowski-what-if-the-bard-wrote-the-big-lebowski.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

A high school friend who paid me a visit last weekend said she still doesn’t know whether reading Jack Kerouac saved or ruined her life. I, for one, could think of no higher praise for a writer. I believe she entered that dissolute Beat’s literary whirlwind through the portal of a second-hand copy of his America-crisscrossing novel On the Road, as many young people do, but since then the internet has made it much easier to get into Kerouac through a variety of other media as well. Long-playing records, for instance: if you happen to use Spotify (and if you don’t yet, you can download the free software to get onboard here), you already have access to a good deal of material delivered in Kerouac’s own voice, sometimes against music. On 1959’s Poetry for the Beat Generation (above), an album he put together with Steve Allen (on whose talk show he famously appeared), he reads his work while Allen accompanies him on the piano. That same year saw the release of Blues and Haikus, featuring that same Kerouac voice and sensibility, but backed this time by jazz saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. On 1960’s Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (bottom), his final spoken-word album, Kerouac goes without jazzmen entirely. But then, some of his die-hard fans might argue that he doesn’t need them, that his use of the English language constitutes more than enough wild, improvisational, but somehow still disciplined music by itself. That may sound like a bit much, but Kerouac actually had a lot in common with his fellow American icons in the realm of jazz, not least a lifestyle that led him into an early grave and a legacy as a figure both tragic and inspiring in equal measure. Maybe you hear it in his prose; maybe you’ll hear it in his voice.   As a final bonus, you can stream a fourth album, On the Beat Generation. Related Content: Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien An 18-Hour Playlist of Readings by the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg & Even Bukowski Too Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959) Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitchhiking Trip Narrated in On the Road 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/free-hours-of-jack-kerouac-reading-beat-poems-verse.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Most of us strive to achieve some kind of distinction—or competence—in one, often quite narrow, field. And for some of us, the path to success involves leaving behind many a path not taken. Childhood pursuits like ballet, for example, the high jump, the trumpet, acting, etc. become hazy memories of former selves as we grow older and busier. But if you have the formidable will and intellect of émigré Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, you see no need to abandon your beloved avocations simply because you are one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers—in both Russian and English. No indeed. You also go on to become a celebrated amateur lepidopterist (see his butterfly drawings here), earning distinction as curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and originator of an evolutionary theory of butterfly migration. And as if that were not enough, you spend your spare time formulating complicated chess problems, earning such a reputation that you are invited in 1970 to join the American chess team to create problems for international competitions. Nabokov was not easily impressed by other writers or scientists, but he held chess players in especially high regard. His "heroes include a chess grandmaster," writes Nabokov scholar Janet Gezari, "and a chess problem composer…; chess games occur in several of the novels; and chess and chess problem language and imagery regularly put his readers’ chess knowledge to the test." His third novel, 1930’s The Defense, centers on a chess master driven to despair by his genius, a character based on real grandmaster Curt von Bardeleben. For Nabokov, the skill and ingenuity required for composing chess problems paralleled that required for great writing: "The strain on the mind is formidable," he wrote in his memoir Speak, Memory, "the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness." Puzzling out chess problems and solutions, he wrote, "demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity and splendid insincerity"—all qualities, we’d have to agree, of Nabokov’s finely wrought fictions. In 1970, Nabokov published Poems and Problems, a collection of thirty-nine Russian poems, with English translations, fourteen English poems, and eighteen chess problems, with solutions. He had pursued this passion since his teens, and published nearly three dozen chess problems in his lifetime. At the top of the post, see one of them, "Mate in 2," sketched out in Nabokov’s hand (try to solve it yourself here). Below it, see another of the author’s chess problem sketches, and in the photo above, see Nabokov absorbed in a chess game with his wife. Though it may seem that Nabokov had limitless energy and time to devote to his extra-literary pursuits, he also wrote with regret about the price he paid for his obsession: "the possessive haunting of my mind," as he called it, "with carved pieces or their intellectual counterparts swallowed up so much time during my most productive and fruitful years, time which I could have better spent on linguistic adventures." Like the lepidopterists still marveling over Nabokov’s contributions to that field, the chess lovers who encounter his problems, and his ingenious use of the game in fiction, would hardly agree that his pursuit of chess was fruitless or unproductive. Related Content: Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/vladimir-nabokovs-hand-drawn-sketches-of-mind-bending-chess-problems.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you took a poll to determine in whose voice most readers would like to hear their audio books, I imagine Orson Welles would land pretty high on the list. And if you took a poll to determine which book most readers would rather approach in audio form than paper form, I imagine Herman Melville’s weighty but undeniably important (and still literarily fascinating) Moby-Dick would land pretty high on the list. Unfortunately for us, Welles never sat down to get the entirety of Moby-Dick on tape, but he did give the book a few readings on film, rounded up today for your enjoyment. Most famously, Welles appeared in John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of the novel as Father Mapple, deliverer of the sermon on Jonah heard by the narrator Ishmael and his bunkmate Queequeg early on in the story, just before they sign on to the Pequod. Possessed of an interest of his own in Melville’s masterwork, Welles used his paycheck from the cameo to bring Moby-Dick to the stage. But he also wanted to do something cinematic with the material, as evidenced by the other two videos here: readings he shot in 1971, during production of The Other Side of the Wind. In them, he speaks the novel’s immortal opening line, "Call me Ishmael." Though he may sound even more compelling in Ishmael’s role than in Father Mapple’s, these clips do make you wonder what, or which character, stoked Welles’ fascination with Moby-Dick in the first place. Certainly we can draw obvious parallels between him and the Pequod‘s Captain Ahab in terms of their tendency toward grand, all-consuming, impossible-seeming projects. Then again, Ahab labors under the idea that man can, with sufficient will, directly perceive all truths, while Welles made F for Fake, so perhaps he was a questioning, skeptical Ishmael after all. Whomever he identified with, this pillar of American cinema must have had big plans for this pillar of American literature — which, alas, we can now only struggle to perceive, just as Ahab and Ishmael struggle to perceive the form of the whale deep in the water. Related Content: How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) The Moby Dick Big Read: Celebrities and Everyday Folk Read a Chapter a Day from the Great American Novel A View From the Room Where Melville Wrote Moby Dick (Plus a Free Celebrity Reading of the Novel) An Illustration of Every Page of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick Orson Welles Reads Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in a 1977 Experimental Film 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/orson-welles-reads-moby-dick-the-great-american-director-takes-on-the-great-american-novel.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Fantasy fiction invariably includes a map for readers to understand the hero’s journey, literally. We know that Hobbits had to walk a long way into Mordor, but seeing it cartographically really hits home. But what of the great road trip novels, where the country is America, the journey is long and often circular, and self-actualization awaits the hero, and not an army of orcs? Atlas Obscura, Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras’ blog of discovery and adventure in the modern world, have come to the rescue with an interactive map that plots out the travels of road trip-filled books, some non-fiction, others fictionalized reality. Where a location is mentioned in a text, it has been pinned to the map, and by clicking on the pin, the relevant text is revealed. Clever stuff. For example, the map for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (see snapshot above) plots out the five trips contained in the novel, and one can see the main hubs of the story: NYC and San Francisco, of course, but also Denver and the crazed detour town to Mexico City, where Sal, Dean, and Stan Shephard party hard in a bordello and Sal winds up with dysentery for his troubles. For something more straightforward, check out the Northwest travels at the heart of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Written in the first person, the novel’s narrator travels by motorcycle with his son from Minnesota to Northern California, ending up in San Francisco, taking 17 days. The philosophical journey, however, covers wider terrain. Another Bay Area tale, Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test starts in La Honda, California, a mountain getaway to the west of San Jose, and, as one can see, completes a circle of the States, including trips to both Calgary, Canada and Manzanillo, Mexico, where everybody is "uptight," man, heading northeast to both Guanajuato and Aguascalientes, where Acid Tests are administered. There’s more at the link, including maps for Wild, A Walk Across America, and Travels with Charley. It might inspire a repeat reading of a favorite book. Or it might inspire you to just light out for the territories. Related Content: The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grateful Dead’s Soundtrack for the 1960s Famous LSD Parties Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959) The Books You Think Every Intelligent Person Should Read: Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/12-classic-literary-road-trips-in-one-handy-interactive-map.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 Emily Dickinson Museum will tell you that "The kitchen appears to be one of the rooms where [Emily] Dickinson felt most comfortable, perhaps most at home." But the "many drafts of poems written on kitchen papers tell us also that this was a space of creative ferment for her, and that the writing of poetry mixed in her life with the making of delicate treats." We still have access to Dickinson’s gingerbread and doughnut recipes. But if you want to see an example of how baking nourished her creative process, then look no further than Emily’s recipe for Coconut Cake. The image above shows the ingredients scratched out in her handwriting: 1 cup coconut 2 cups flour 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup milk 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar On the flip side of the recipe, Dickinson then wrote the beginning of a poem, "The Things that never can come back, are several" (read the transcript here). Presumably the recipe inspired the poem, but perhaps it was the other way around? If you’re looking for your own source of creative inspiration, you can try out Dickinson’s recipes for Black Cake and also Rye and Indian Bread here. (According to The Public Domain Review, "her loaf of Indian and Rye won second prize in the Amherst Cattle Show of 1856.") And you can even head up to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA and take part in their annual baking contest. Over at NPR, Dickinson scholar Nelly Lambert has more on the poet’s relationship to baking and food. Related Content: The Online Emily Dickinson Archive Makes Thousands of the Poet’s Manuscripts Freely Available The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges Watch an Animated Film of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Started Early-Took My Dog’ http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/emily-dickinsons-handwritten-coconut-cake-recipe-hints-at-how-baking-figured-into-her-creative-process.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Despite breaking his leg during a gig earlier this summer, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have blitzed their way through Europe and America, playing sometimes 5-6 shows per week, in cities often large, but sometimes small. On September 16th, the band will make a pitstop in my hometown, Mountain View, CA (population 75,000). So it doesn’t seem implausible for the residents of Cesena, Italy (population 100,000) to ask the Foo Fighters to play a show in their small city, which sits right near the Adriatic Sea. And boy did they make the request in style. I get chills when I watch this, every time. Update: Days later, Dave Grohl responds … in Italian: Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/1000-musicians-perform-the-foo-fighters-learn-to-fly-in-italy.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 picture of punk as the domain of boorish nihilists who can’t play their instruments has been as much a creation of marketing (via Malcolm McLaren) as it has been a virtue-of-necessity minimalist pose and a form of avant garde DIY experimentalism. But there have always been, since the coining of the term "punk" as a musical genre, stellar musicians and thoughtful, poetic lyricists shaping the scene. Of the former, we must mention Television, with their magnificent guitar interplay between leader Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. And, of the latter, we need look no further than the godmother of punk herself, Patti Smith, who has always commanded stage and studio with her smart, arresting lyricism and powerful set of pipes. Years before the Sex Pistols invaded the States, these two bands played regularly at CBGBs (Television was, in fact, the very first band to play there) with a loose collection of misfits who re-invented rock and roll. In December, 1975, Smith released her first album, Horses, a hybrid of punk and spoken word produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. But before that record made her famous—in April of that year—the Patti Smith Group took the stage with Television, and two teenage fans were there to record both sets from both bands. First appearing as a bootleg CD generically titled "Early Gig ’75," the disc has since been reissued as We Can’t Do Anymore… Cause I’m Just Too Tired!, with another set of Smith covers tacked on from a ’78 concert in Santa Monica. We get classic tracks from both bands, such as Television’s "Marquee Moon" and "Little Johnny Jewell" and Smith’s cover of "Hey Joe" and Van Morrison’s "Gloria" as well as her own "Horses" and "Piss Factory." At the top of the post, you can hear her do six songs from that night in 1975, the last three with Television joining her onstage: "We’re Going to Have a Real Good Time Together" (Velvet Underground cover), "Redondo Beach," "Birdland," "Space Monkey," "Distant Fingers," and "Gloria." You’ll also hear the two young tapers chatting it up in the first few minutes of the tape. Smith’s band, writes bootleg blog Doom & Gloom From the Tomb, "was transitioning from a cabaret-leaning trio to a fully-fledged rock band sound," and the ramshackle performances show us a talented bunch of musicians still finding their footing as a group. The following year, Smith and band would appear in Stockholm after the release of Horses. As you can see and hear above (after a brief interview) they’d become a tighter, and somewhat more conventional, rock and roll machine, but the early performances at the top—for all the lo-fi murkiness and intrusive crowd noise—have a raw appeal only heightened by the fact that they are now important documents of a now-legendary musical era. See this review of the bootleg CD reissue for a blow-by-blow description of this historic ’75 concert from two seminal, and phenomenally talented, punk bands. Related Content: The Talking Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975) The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974) Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vintage Clips Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/patti-smith-plays-at-cbgb-in-one-of-her-first-recorded-concerts.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Beatboxing, the practice of producing drum machine-like beats (especially TR-808-like beats) with one’s voice, has long since made the transition from parlor trick to acknowledged musical art form. But we still have much to understand about it, as the recently-emerged first generation of beatboxing scholars knows full well. "A team of linguistics and engineering students at USC wanted to learn more about the mechanics behind the rhythms," writes Los Angeles Times music critic Randall Roberts. "By using MRI technology, they recorded an unnamed local beatboxer working his magic, broke down the most commonly employed sounds by examining the movements of his mouth and then analyzed the data." This resulted in a paper called "Paralinguistic Mechanisms of Production in Human ‘Beatboxing’: A Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study." Roberts describes it as "predictably heavy with linguistic jargon, but even to a civilian, the results are illuminating," especially the video the research team recorded, "which reveals how the human mouth can so convincingly create the pop of a snare drum." At the top of the post, you can see this sort of thing for yourself: in this video "The Diva and the Emcee," featured at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions in Seattle, we see how a beatboxer’s technique compares to that of an opera singer. You can find out more at the site of the Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge group (SPAN), the USC team that performed this pioneering research into an important component of one of the pillars of hip hop. Keep their findings in mind next time you watch a beatboxing clip that goes viral (such as the Goldberg Variations one we featured back in 2012) for a richer listening experience. After all, it does no harm to the romance of the beatbox, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, to know a little bit about it. Related Content: Beatboxing Bach’s Goldberg Variations All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music Langston Hughes Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Wonderful Illustrated Book for Kids (1954) Do Rappers Have a Bigger Vocabulary Than Shakespeare?: A Data Scientist Maps Out the Answer 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/what-beatboxing-and-opera-singing-look-like-inside-an-mri-machine.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 Timmy Brothers, based in Brooklyn, create handcrafted water. It’s not just any water. It’s water that lets you travel to different cultural times and places. Want to drink water that evokes memories of Mark Twain’s Mississippi River? Or the great jazz that came out of New Orleans? Well, the Timmy Brothers have just the product for you. If you’re in Brooklyn, also consider making a side trip to Beacon, NY where David Rees lovingly creates artisanal handcrafted pencils. You’ll never look at pencils the same way again. via Digg Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/brooklyn-based-makers-of-artisanal-water-let-you-sip-from-americas-great-cultural-waters.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account last week couldn’t avoid hearing about Walter James Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who allegedly went trophy hunting in Zimbabwe and killed Cecil the Lion, a local favorite who had been illegally lured away from a protected wildlife preserve. I won’t say anything more about it, other than that you can sign a petition to get Palmer extradited to Zimbabwe and let him defend his actions to local authorities. Meanwhile, back in New York City, two artists Travis Threlkel and Louie Psihoyos were getting ready to turn The Empire State building into a Noah’s Ark of Endangered Animals. And that’s exactly what happened on Saturday night. Placing "40 stacked, 20,000-lumen projectors on the roof of a nearby building," Threlkel and Psihoyos projected an array of endangered animals "onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide covering 33 floors," reports The New York Times. You can see photos of the animals over at the Racing Extinction Twitter stream. Touchingly, there was an homage to Cecil the Lion. A video from the Times appears above; another from The New Yorker below. To learn more about how Project Mapping works, and to see other examples of Threlkel’s work, see the videos on this page. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/endangered-species-including-cecil-the-lion-projected-onto-the-empire-state-building.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Paintings by Maria A. Aristidou As philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, "the medium is the message." Artist Maria A. Aristidou’s medium is coffee, and lately, she’s been garnering a lot of attention for java-based portraits of such cultural luminaries as Einstein, Darth Vader and The Beatles. The prolific and highly-caffeinated artist found her niche when an accidental spill gave rise to a somewhat sullen facsimile of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. She has since applied her espresso blends toward the Mona Lisa and one of Baroque era painter Juan de Arellano’s floral still lifes, but for the most part, she draws her subjects from the realm of pop culture. Dorm room faves like Marilyn Monroe, Bob Marley, and John Lennon are overshadowed by fictional superstars like Frozen’s Queen Elsa, Nintendo’s Mario, and various personages from Game of Thrones. My favorite? Kyle MacLachlan as Twin Peaks’ Agent Dale "Damn fine cup of coffee, Diane!" Cooper. That’s not just medium. That’s meta! Aristidou is not the only artist finding inspiration in this non-traditional pigment. A recent NPR story on the trend cites coffee artists Angel Sarkela-Saur and Andy Saur and Giulia Bernardelli. Scroll backwards to the mid-1800s and you’ll find author—and gifted draftsman—Victor Hugo experimenting with the stuff. Nor was his promiscuous nib a stranger to the artistic possibilities of soot, coal dust, and blood. Aristidou, who holds degrees in Fine Art Printmaking and Arts Health, eschews the traditional artist’s website in favor of social media. Not only is she a master of the hashtag, she also designs cakes. View her complete oeuvre—including several cartons of corporate logo Easter eggs and some recent fashion illustrations that combine watercolor with java—on her Facebook or Instagram pages. Above you can watch Aristidou paint portraits of Einstein, the Beatles and R2D2 in quick time-lapse motion. Related Content: Victor Hugo’s Surprisingly Modern Drawings Made with Coal, Dust & Coffee (1848-1851) J.S. Bach’s Comic Opera, "The Coffee Cantata," Sings the Praises of the Great Stimulating Drink (1735) Black Coffee: Documentary Covers the History, Politics & Economics of the "Most Widely Taken Legal Drug" The Fine Art of Painting Portraits on Coffee Foam Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/coffee-portraits-of-john-lennon-albert-einstein-marilyn-monroe.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. %%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

It may be true that speculation about an author’s personal history can prove not especially illuminating to reading their books. We generally think it best to read a literary work on its own terms. But in certain cases, as in the well-worn case of Ernest Hemingway, the parallels between life and work are impossible to ignore or to pass over without comment, and, for many critics, this goes particularly for discussions about Hemingway’s gender and sexuality. Even Hemingway’s contemporaries had their commentary. Zelda Fitzgerald supposedly remarked that no one could be as masculine as Hemingway, for example, and Virginia Woolf referred to him as "self consciously virile." Themes of homosexuality and gender anxiety crop up in Hemingway’s fiction, and more prominently in unpublished work unearthed in the 1980s. For critics like Debra Moddelmog, author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit if Ernest Hemingway, the biographical interest begins with the hyper-macho modernist’s early childhood, during which his mother Grace raised him and his older sister Marcelline as twin girls, dressing them alike "in fancy dresses and flowered hats." This apparently happened over a period of several years, until Hemingway was at least five years old, and Grace even held Marcelline back a year so that the two could attend the same grade. Though one of Hemingway’s younger sisters, Sunny, has "denied that the twinning ever took place" the evidence seems to show otherwise—in Marcelline’s reminisces and in photograph after photograph of young Ernest and Marcelline dressed exactly alike and having tea parties, riding in wagons, and holding bouquets. You can see them in 1901, in bonnets above and flowered hats below. At the top of the post, see Hemingway in a girlish haircut identical to his sister’s, and below, see two photographs of him in a wide-shouldered dress. At the JFK Library website (click here and scroll to bottom), you can now view many more of these photographs from Hemingway’s first few years on up to the age of 18. The digitized collection of six childhood scrapbooks, the library writes, were "collected by Ernest Hemingway himself and donated to the John F. Kennedy Library by his widow, Mary Hemingway." Many of the childhood photographs are fascinating for various reasons, though the "twinning" photographs have provoked the most interest and contributed to already rich theories of Hemingway’s identity as a person and an artist. Looked at in the context of the time, these photographs don’t seem all that odd. As anyone who has flipped through family albums from the turn of the century (should they have them) will have noticed, little boys were routinely dressed in ambiguously girlish attire, their long hair often styled and curled. The fashion derived partly from a hugely popular character in children’s fiction named "Little Lord Fauntleroy," the Harry Potter of his day, who had a rags-to-riches story that captivated American readers especially. The character has been the subject of film adaptations even as late as 1980, in which he was played by a young Ricky Schroeder. Fauntleroy had some influence on Grace Hemingway. (See Hemingway in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, with football, in a 1909 photograph below.) Fauntleroy and other similar characters’ model of "genteel manhood" gained widespread currency. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Victorian novels featuring this character came at a time when childhood was viewed through a much different lens than it is today. (As we’ve seen in the photography of Lewis Carroll and many other artists of the time in which children appear as props and dolls, sometimes in strangely suggestive or androgynous poses that would not have seemed especially prurient or gender-bending to their original viewers.) The trend continued into the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, despite less rigid childhood gender norms, as Hemingway biographer Kenneth Schuyler Lynn writes, Grace Hemingway’s "elaborate pretense that little Ernest and his sister were twins of the same sex" was very unusual. Critics like Moddelmog and Mark Spilka have argued convincingly that Hemingway "rebelled against that identity," a rebellion that "lasted a lifetime." Related Content: 18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Ernest Hemingway’s Delusional Adventures in Boxing: "My Writing is Nothing, My Boxing is Everything." Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Alice Liddell, the Inspiration for Alice in Wonderland Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/ernest-hemingway-his-sister-dressed-as-twin-girls.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut Clerks did much to define the low-budget, high-profile "Indiewood" boom of that era. But set a trend on America’s cultural fringe, and it never takes long for the mainstream to come calling. In this case, the mainstream wanted to cash in on a Clerks television sitcom, the only produced episode of which spent the past couple decades languishing in the vast graveyard of pilots no network would pick up before its rediscovery just this year. You can watch it in all its sanitized glory just above. Even though those of us who grew up on the mid-1990s televisual landscape won’t recognize the never-aired Clerks itself, we’ll recognize its sensibility right away. "It gives me bad flashbacks to the pre-web monoculture," writes one commenter on the Metafilter thread about the show — a monoculture built, at that time, upon one-liners and their corresponding laugh tracks, floppy hair and baggy clothes. Ironically, it was that very same dominant glossy blandness that made Clerks, the movie, feel so fresh when it first made its way from festival to theatrical release. Still, this failed TV adaptation does retain a few elements of its source material: the convenience-store setting (though here called Rose Market rather than Quick Stop), the main characters named Dante and Randal. But the resemblance more or less stops there. "Gone are the movie’s iconic drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob," writes the A.V. Club’s Christopher Curley, "replaced by backup characters including an ice cream server and a tanning salon ditz. Some of the beats of the film are still there, like Randal harassing his video store customers, but nothing lands or even remotely coheres." Kevin Smith made Clerks with $27,575. Clerks the sitcom pilot, made entirely without Smith’s involvement, certainly cost much more — money that bought zero cultural impact, especially by comparison to the film that inspired it. The Indiewood movement showed us how much untapped vitality American cinema still had; almost everything on television looked like lifeless productions-by-committee by comparison. But now that Clerks has passed its twentieth anniversary, the tables have turned, and we look to television for the raw, real stories Hollywood doesn’t tell. The travails of a couple of young sex- and Star Wars-obsessed dead-enders in grim suburban New Jersey, shot in black-and-white 16-millimeter film — would CBS care to hear more? via Metafilter/AV Club Related Content: Watch the Hardcore Original Ending to Kevin Smith’s 1994 Cult Hit Clerks Watch Kevin Smith’s Clever First Film, Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary (1992) The Always-NSFW Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes Catch Up in Jay and Silent Bob Get Old Podcast Hear Kevin Smith’s Three Tips For Aspiring Filmmakers (NSFW) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/watch-the-never-aired-pilot-for-clerks-1995.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Next month, David Gilmour will release his first solo album since 2006 and launch his first tour since ’08. But right now, in the dead of August, you can watch a new animated video for his upcoming track, "Rattle That Lock." Created under the leadership of Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis (the design group that produced the iconic artwork for Dark Side of the Moon and other Pink Floyd LPs), the animation pays homage to Gustave Doré, whose illustrations of Dante, Poe and Cervantes we’ve featured here before. And the lyrics themselves, they draw inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, reports Rolling Stone. Gilmour, Doré, Milton — surely a trifecta for many OC readers. Related Content: Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" (1884) Gustave Doré’s Exquisite Engravings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/pink-floyds-david-gilmour-releases-new-animated-video-inspired-by-gustave-dore-miltons-paradise-lost.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Depending on who’s counting, Joe Maggard was the eighth or ninth person to have the honor of officially portraying Ronald McDonald. (The first, if you’re looking for some pop culture trivia, was Willard Scott, from the Today show.) Maggard filled Ronald’s big red shoes from 1995 until 2007. And nowadays you can find him chilling in Las Vegas, occasionally donning the famous clown costume at local carnivals, and helping kids (he says with a straight face) learn the importance of healthy eating. He’s a colorful guy, who can use some colorful language. I Was Ronald McDonald is a short doc from The Guardian. Find more docs in our collection of 200 Free Online Documentaries. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-eighth-ronald-mcdonald-a-short-slightly-strange-documentary-from-the-guardian.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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.