Ralph Steadman will always best be known—and for good reason—as the visual interpreter of Hunter S. Thompson’s druggy gonzo vision of American excess and hubris. As Colin Marshall wrote in a previous post on Steadman and Thompson’s powerful collaborative relationship, it’s hard to imagine a more "suitable visual accompaniment to the simultaneously clear- and wild-eyed sensibility of Thompsonian prose." But the British artist has had a long and distinguished career, pre- and post-Thompson: illustrating Lewis Carroll’s surrealist classic Alice in Wonderland; creating limited edition DVD covers for the dark cult hit TV show Breaking Bad; making bullet-riddled collage art with counterculture hero William S. Burroughs…. To name just a few of his offbeat assignments over the years. Today we bring you a lesser-known facet of Steadman’s work: designing album covers. As artist and illustrator John Coulthart notes in a post on Steadman’s album designs, he’s been at it since the mid-fifties, when—for example—he illustrated a release of Conception (top), "an underappreciated masterpiece of cerebral cool jazz" featuring the likes of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Sonny Rollins. Steadman’s abstract expressionist-inspired jazz covers soon gave way to more Steadmanesque, though still relatively tame, covers like that above for The Who’s single "Happy Jack"/"I’ve Been Away" from 1966. It’s not until the 70s, however—after he’d begun his collaboration with Thompson—that his album covers begin to take on the decidedly crazed look his work is known for, such as in the cover for Paul Brett’s Phoenix Future, above, from 1975. By 1997, Steadman seems to have perfected his inimitable riot of grotesque imagery, wild color palette, and unhinged black lines and lettering, as in the cover for Closed On Account Of Rabies: Poems And Tales Of Edgar Allan Poe, a compilation of Poe readings by stars like Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Jeff Buckley, and Abel Ferrara, which we’ve featured on OC before. The artists represented here are—as in his work with Thompson and Burroughs—perfectly fitting for Steadman’s sensibility. So, of course, is the clean-living but otherwise totally bonkers Frank Zappa, whose 1997 Have I Offended Someone? received the Steadman treatment, as you can see below. In the past few years, Steadman has mellowed a bit, if you could call it that, and his work has taken on a slightly more refined character. His Breaking Bad illustrations seem restrained by the standards of his work with Thompson or Zappa. And in a 2010 cover for Slash’s first official single, "By the Sword," below, he reigns in some of his wilder graphic impulses while retaining all of the stylist signatures he developed over the decades. Steadman has always been a one-of-a-kind illustrator. In his album cover design, we can perhaps best watch his work evolve. As Coulthart writes, "the style of the early sleeves is markedly different to the angry, splattery creations that made his name, and without a signature you’d be unlikely to recognise the artist." See many more Steadman album covers over at Coulthart’s excellent blog. via Feuilleton Related Content:  Breaking Bad Illustrated by Gonzo Artist Ralph Steadman See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary Gun Nut William S. Burroughs & Gonzo Illustrator Ralph Steadman Make Polaroid Portraits Together Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/ralph-steadmans-evolving-album-cover-designs.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 BBC’s recent series of Nigel Warburton-scripted, celebrity-narrated animations in philosophy haven’t shied away from the hard questions the discipline touches. How did everything begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? In all those videos, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry, and Harry Shearer told us what history’s most thought-about thinkers have had to say on those subjects. But for the latest round, Warburton and The Hobbit‘s Aidan Turner have taken on what some would consider, at least for our practical purposes, the trickiest one of all: what is love? You might not turn to Jean-Paul Sartre, life partner of Simone de Beauvoir, as a first love consultant of choice, but the series devotes an entire video to the Being and Nothingness author’s theories on emotion. The freedom-minded Sartre sees the condition of love as a "hazardous, painful struggle," one of either masochism or sadism: "masochism when a lover tries to become what he thinks his lover wants him to be, and in the process denies his own freedom; sadism when the lover treats the loved one as an object and ties her down. Either way, freedom is compromised." Have we any lighter philosophical perspectives on love here? Well, we have a variety of philosophical perspectives on love, anyway: Aristophanes’ creation myth of the "missing half," Sigmund Freud and Edvard Westermarck’s disagreement over the Oedipus complex, and the conviction of "psychological egoists" from Thomas Hobbes to Richard Dawkins that no such thing as strictly selfless love exists. The philosophy of love, like love itself, can get complicated, but the clear and witty drawings accompanying the ideas discussed in these videos can help us envision the different ideas they encompass. Should you need even clearer (or less witty) illustrations on the subject, you could always turn to Love Is…, though I have a feeling you’d find that solution a bit too simple. Watch all of the animated videos in the What is Love? playlist here. Related Content: What is the Self? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More How Did Everything Begin?: Animations on the Origins of the Universe Narrated by X-Files Star Gillian Anderson What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC How to Live a Good Life? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Philosophy Animations on Ethics Narrated by Harry Shearer Download 130 Free Philosophy Courses: Tools for Thinking About Life, Death & Everything Between Lovers and Philosophers — Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir Together in 1967 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/what-is-love-bbc-philosophy-animations-feature-sartre.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.

Imagine a hat. Flip it upside down, and you’ve got yourself the outline of a story the public will never weary of, according to author Kurt Vonnegut, who maps it on out a chalkboard in the video above. His Y-axis charts a range between good and ill fortune. Vonnegut recommends positioning your main character slightly closer to the good (i.e. wealth and boisterous health) end of the spectrum, at least in the beginning. He or she will dip below midline soon enough. As for the X-axis, Vonnegut labels it B-E, from beginning to end. Now plot your points, remembering that it’s all about the curves. Some popular themes include people getting in and out of trouble, and the evergreen boy gets girl. (The always progressive Vonnegut reminds his viewers that the genders in the latter scenario are always open to interpretation. Again, it’s the curves that count…) Thinking about my favorite books and films, it seems that most do follow Vonnegut’s upside-down hat narrative arc. Are there exceptions? Horatio Alger’s rags to riches stories, for example. We should all be so lucky to find ourselves powering up such a steep uphill grade. Of course there are exceptions! Vonnegut himself identifies a particularly high profile one, whose geometry is less an elegant curve than a staircase that terminates in a free fall. (SPOILER: it involves a fairy godmother and ends in an infinity symbol. Those weary of parsing story using the Hero’s Journey template should investigate Vonnegut’s graphic approach. It works! Related Content: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story Kurt Vonnegut Explains "How to Write With Style" Kurt Vonnegut Urges Young People to Make Art and "Make Your Soul Grow" Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/kurt-vonnegut-maps-out-the-universal-shapes-of-our-favorite-stories-2.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.

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel reportedly carried rocks in their pockets during the premiere of their first film Un Chien andalou, anticipating a violent reaction from the audience. It was a fair concern. The movie might be almost 90 years old but it still has the power to provoke - the film features a shot of a woman getting her eye slashed open with a straight razor after all. As it turned out, rocks weren’t needed. The audience, filled with such avant-garde luminaries as Pablo Picasso and André Breton liked the film. A disappointed Dalí later reported that the night was "less exciting" than he had hoped. Un Chien andalou featured many of Dalí’s visual obsessions - eyeballs, ants crawling out of orifices and rotting animals. Dalí delighted in shocking and inciting people with his gorgeous, disturbing images. And he loved grandiose spectacles like a riot at a movie theater. Dalí and Buñuel’s next movie, the caustic L’Age d’or, exposed the differences between the two artists and their creative partnership imploded in pre-production. Buñuel went on to make a string of subversive masterpieces like Land Without Bread, Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois; Dalí largely quit film in favor of his beautifully crafted paintings. Then Hollywood came calling. Alfred Hitchcock hired Dalí to create a dream sequence for his 1945 movie Spellbound. Dalí crafted over 20 minutes of footage of which roughly four and a half minutes made it into the movie. "I wanted to convey the dream with great visual sharpness and clarity-sharper than film itself," Hitchcock explained to Francois Truffaut in 1962. The sequence, which you can see immediately above, is filled with all sorts of Daliesque motifs - slashed eyeballs, naked women and phantasmagoric landscapes. It is also the most memorable part of an otherwise minor work by Hitchcock. Dalí’s follow up film work was for, of all things, the Vincente Minnelli comedy Father of the Bride (1950). Spencer Tracy plays Stanley Banks whose beautiful daughter (Elizabeth Taylor, no less) is getting married. As Stanley’s anxiety over the impending nuptials spirals, he has one very weird nightmare. Cue Dalí. Stanley is late to the wedding. As he rushes down the aisle, his clothes mysteriously get shredded by the tiled floor that bounces and contorts like a piece of flesh. This dream sequence, which you can see at the top of the article, has few of the visual flourishes of Spellbound, but it still has plenty of Dalí’s trademark weirdness. Those floating accusatory eyes. The way that Tracy’s leg seems to stretch. That floor. Father of the Bride marked the end of Dalí’s work in Hollywood, though there were a couple potential collaborations that would have been amazing had they actually happened. Dalí had an idea for a movie with the Marx Brothers called Giraffes on Horseback Salad. The movie would have "included a scene of giraffes wearing gas masks and one of Chico sporting a deep-diving suit while playing the piano." Though Harpo was reportedly enthusiastic about the proposed idea, Groucho wasn’t and the idea sadly came to nothing. Later in life, Dalí became a fixture on the talk show circuit. On the Dick Cavett Show in 1970, he flung an anteater at Lillian Gish. Related Content:  Two Vintage Films by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel: Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or The Seashell and the Clergyman: The World’s First Surrealist Film Alfred Hitchcock Recalls Working with Salvador Dali on Spellbound A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali, Narrated by the Great Orson Welles A Tour Inside Salvador Dalí’s Labyrinthine Spanish Home 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/2015/08/salvador-dali-goes-to-hollywood-creates-wild-dream-sequences-for-hitchcock-vincente-minnelli.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.

During the past year, sitting has become the new smoking. "Past studies have found," declares a 2014 article in The New York Times, "the more hours that people spend sitting, the more likely they are to develop diabetes, heart disease and other conditions, and potentially to die prematurely — even if they exercise regularly." What’s the science behind this alarming claim? The animated TED-ED video (above) begins to paint the picture. But it doesn’t get into the latest and perhaps most important research. According to science writer Gretchen Reynolds, a recent Swedish study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that when you sit all day, your telomeres (the tiny caps on the ends of DNA strands) get shorter. Which is not a good thing. As telomeres get shorter, the rate at which the body ages and decays speeds up. Conversely, the study found "that the telomeres in [those] who were sitting the least had lengthened. Their cells seemed to be growing physiologically younger." Several months ago, KQED radio in San Francisco aired a program dedicated to this question, featuring medical and ergonomics experts. To delve deeper into it, listen above. Or click here. Meanwhile, if you have advice on how to incorporate movement into your day, please share it with your fellow readers in the comments section below. And if your mind immediately drifts to buying a standing desk, then check out our related post: Who Wrote at Standing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dickens and Ernest Hemingway Too 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/why-sitting-is-the-new-smoking-an-animated-explanation.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.

My introduction to the work of James Newell Osterberg, Jr, better known as Iggy Pop, came in the form of "Risky," a song from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Neo Geo album that featured not just singing but spoken word from the Stooges’ lead vocalist and punk icon. On that track, Pop speaks grimly and evocatively in the persona of a protagonist "born in a corporate dungeon where people are cheated of life," repeatedly invoking the human compulsion to "climb to this point, move on, climb to this point, move on." Ultimately, he poses the question: "Career, career, acquire, acquire — but what is life without a heart?" Today, we give you Iggy Pop the storyteller asking what life is with a heart — or rather, one heart too many, unceasingly reminding you of your guilt. He tells the story, of course, of "The Tell-Tale Heart," originally written by the American master of psychological horror Edgar Allan Poe in 1843. This telling appears on the album Closed on Account of Rabies, which features Poe’s stories as interpreted by the likes of Pop, Christopher Walken, Debbie Harry, Marianne Faithfull and Jeff Buckley. We featured it here on Open Culture a few years back, and more recently included it in our retrospective of album covers by Ralph Steadman. Here, Pop takes on the role of another narrator consigned to a grim fate, though this one of his own making. As almost all of us know, if only through cultural osmosis, the titular "Tell-Tale Heart," its beat seemingly emanating from under the floorboards, unceasingly reminds this anxious character of the fact that he has murdered an old man — not out of hatred, not out of greed, but out of simple need stoked, he insists, by the defenseless senior’s "vulture-eye." For over 150 years, readers have judged the sanity of the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" in any number of ways, but don’t render your own verdict until you’ve heard Iggy Pop deliver the testimony; nobody walks the line between sanity and insanity quite like he does. Related Content: Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven." See Readings by Reed and Willem Dafoe Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee Watch the 1953 Animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart," Narrated by James Mason Hear a Great Radio Documentary on William S. Burroughs Narrated by Iggy Pop Edgar Allan Poe Animated: Watch Four Animations of Classic Poe Stories Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe on His Birthday 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free 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/iggy-pop-reads-edgar-allan-poes-classic-horror-story-the-tell-tale-heart.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 story of the avant-garde is never just one story. But it tends to get told that way, and we tend to think we know how modernist and post-modern literature and music have taken shape: through a series of great men who thwarted convention and remade language and sound in ways their predecessors never dreamed. Arthur Rimbaud, Claude Debussy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage… We could make many such lists, and we do, all the time, occasionally including the names of a few women—Yoko Ono, for example, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf…. But we might write it differently, indeed, for the simple reason that women have shaped the avant-garde just as much as men have, as prominent poets and composers, not simply spouses of famous men or guest stars in a mostly male revue. You can hear one version of such a story here, thanks to Ubuweb, "the learned and varietous online repository" of "all things avant-garde." Their podcast Avant-Garde All the Time offers us two episodes called "The Women of the Avant-Garde," hosted by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who admits the survey is a corrective for the podcast’s own blind spots. Through a small but select number of poets and musicians, Goldsmith aims "to show that there are dozens and dozens of great women artists on Ubuweb"—and everywhere else art lives. Instead of a history, Goldsmith gives us something of a constellation of artists, many of them clustered tightly together in time and space. New York poets, writers, and musicians who came of age in the 70s and 80s—Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles—all feature in Goldsmith’s account. Theirs was a time and place the poet Myles has described as "a moment" that was "very uncensored and really excited and it just made you feel like there was room for more." It’s a moment that saw a revival in the 90s, when riot grrrl arose to challenge the patriarchal establishment. Around this time, artists working in a more academic context directly and indirectly engaged with literary history ancient and modern. Scholar and poet Anne Carson has twisted and translated the texts of Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the writers (and translators) of the King James Bible. And German-Norwegian-French experimental poet Caroline Bergvall, whom Goldsmith discusses in episode one above, rewrote Chaucer and rearranged Dante. In episode two, Goldsmith reaches somewhat further back—to Yoko Ono and Denise Levertov—and farther away from New York, with work from Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad. Prominently featured in this second part of the series, and for good reason, is fierce patroness of early twentieth century avant-garde art and writing, Gertrude Stein. Stein’s own poetry radically disrupted the accepted, and acceptable, codes of speech and writing—setting a precedent for several decades of feminist writers and artists whose appearance in archives like Ubuweb, Goldsmith notes, increasingly come to match or outweigh those of their male counterparts. Hear Stein read from her own work at another such archive, PennSound, and visit the Poetry Foundation to stream and download more episodes of Ubuweb’s Avant-Garde all the Time, including an episode devoted to Stein called "Almost Completely Understanding." Related Content: 74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice Yoko Ono Lets Audience Cut Up Her Clothes in Conceptual Art Performance (Carnegie Hall, 1965) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-women-of-the-avant-garde.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.

In January, in the dead of winter, we got you thinking about warmer times by highlighting the Noam Chomsky Garden Gnome, a real product described as follows: Standing at just under 17 inches, Gnome Chomsky the Garden Noam clutches his classic books, ‘The Manufacture of Compost’ and ‘Hedgerows not Hegemony’ - with his open right hand ready to hold the political slogan of your choosing. His clothes represent a relaxed but classy version of regular gnome attire, including: a nice suit jacket-tunic, jeans, boots, traditional gnome cap, and glasses. Additionally, Noam Gnome stands on a base complete with a carved title - for anyone who may not immediately realize the identity of this handsome and scholarly gnome. Now that it’s summer, imagine Gnome Chomsky hanging in your garden with Howard the Zinn Monk. Zinn Monk, get it? First published in 1980, Zinn’s famous book A People’s History of the United States tells "America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers." It has sold more than two million copies over the past 35 years. And, as I write this post, it’s the #1 bestselling book in US history on Amazon. Howard the Zinn Monk isn’t quite selling at the same brisk clip. But the web site justsaygnome.net might make you a Zinn gnome if you ask nicely. In the meantime, you can watch and enjoy this illustrated video: Howard Zinn’s "What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire." 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/adorn-your-garden-with-howard-the-zinn-monk.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.

What makes Pablo Picasso such a representative 20th-century artist? Most of it has to do with his particular achievements, such as the visual ground he broke with his Cubist painting, sure, but some of it also has to do with the fact that his interests extended so far beyond painting. We think of creators who could create across various domains as "Renaissance men," but conditions a few centuries on from the Renaissance enabled such artists to exert their will across an even wider range of forms. Picasso, for instance, worked in not just painting but sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, and letters. That last even includes poetry, to which Picasso announced his commitment in 1935, at the age of 53. At that point, writes Dangerous Minds‘ Paul Gallagher, "he began writing poems almost every day until the summer of 1959," beginning "by daubing colors for words in a notebook before moving on to using words to sketch images," ultimately producing hundreds of poems composed primarily of "stream of consciousness, unpunctuated word association with startling juxtaposition of images and at times an obsession with sex, death and excrement." If this sounds like your cup of tea, you can find plenty of Picasso poetry over at Ubuweb, which offers A Picasso Sampler: Excerpts from the Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems free for the viewing. "Picasso, like any poet of consequence, is a man fully into his time and into the terrors that his time presents," writes the collection’s editor Jerome Rothenberg. His words reflect "the state of things between the two world wars — the first one still fresh in mind and the rumblings of the second starting up," a time and place "where poetry becomes — for him as for us — the only language that makes sense." Before diving into that collection, you can also get a sense of Picasso’s poetry by having a look at some of his shorter poems collected at the site of artist Jef Borgeau, such as "the artist & his model": turn your back but stay in view at the same time (now look away, anything else confuses) stand still without saying a word you can’t see but this is how i separate day from night and the starless sky from the empty heart "dogs": dogs eat at the night buried in the yard they chase the moon in a pack the white of their teeth compared to stars the windows close against them iron bars in transparency life closes against them the morning will crush them to dust with only the wind left to stir them up And "the morning of the world": i have a face cut from ice a heart pierced in a thousand places so to remember always the same voice the same gestures and my laughter heavy as a wall between you and me the ones who are most alive seem the most still behind the milky way a shadow dances our gaze climbs toward the stars Related Content: Picasso Painting on Glass Pablo Picasso’s Two Favorite Recipes: Eel Stew & Omelette Tortilla Niçoise The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein 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/read-pablo-picassos-poetry.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.

Last year Jonathan Nolan-screenwriter of Memento and Interstellar and not coincidentally director Christopher Nolan’s brother-announced that he would be developing Isaac Asimov’s legendary Foundation trilogy for HBO as a series. And we assume he’s still doing that, because there’s been nary a peep from the channel since. So far the Internet consensus has been a collective "well, that could be good!" instead of groans, which is a heartening thing these days. For those who haven’t read the classic books, but would like to get the jump on ol’ Nolan, we submit this BBC Radio production from 1973, which is now available on Spotify. (Download Spotify software here.) The recording also lives on Archive.org as well. Right from the beginning we know we are in good hands, with the analog drones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop ushering us into a stereo landscape filled with plummy British accents and atmospheric sound effects. It’s like the best ever episode of Doctor Who without a Tardis, corridors, or the enfeebled cries of a lost companion. The Foundation Trilogy is heavily indebted to Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as a belief in the circular nature of history. Asimov’s hero in the first book, Hari Seldon, using a science called psychohistory, can see the inevitable collapse of the Galactic Empire in which he lives and sets about trying to change it by setting up an opposition called the Foundation. The novels then jump decades ahead, checking in with this essential conflict, much like Gibbon’s work goes from emperor to emperor, marking the decline of empire and its inevitability. Free of aliens and shoot-em-ups, Foundation is very human despite its galactic scope. Adapted by Patrick Tull and Mike Stott, the eight part radio series does a good job of presenting the novels as a character-driven drama, and while it is talky (it’s radio after all), it was Orson Scott Card who said of Foundation, it is "all talk, no action — but Asimov’s talk is action." It also influenced many future sci-fi writers. No doubt somewhere along the way Douglas Adams was listening to the radio play’s talking encyclopedia and thinking, hmm, what if this had jokes? And once you get through the trilogy-maybe after an eight-hour flight?-there’s more Asimov radio plays for your listening pleasure on Spotify: Hostess, Pebble in the Sky, and Nightfall.   Related Content: Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story "The Last Question" Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy Listen to 188 Dramatized Science Fiction Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard & More Two Documentaries Introduce Delia Derbyshire, the Pioneer in Electronic Music 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free 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/2015/08/isaac-asimovs-foundation-trilogy-hear-the-1973-radio-dramatization.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 is surprising to me, but a few people I’ve come across don’t know the name of cartoonist Robert Crumb, cult hero of underground comics and obscure Americana record collecting. On second thought, maybe this shouldn’t come as such a surprise. These are some pretty small worlds, after all, populated by obsessive fans and archivists and not always particularly welcoming to outsiders. But Crumb is different. For all his social awkwardness and hyper-obsessiveness, he seems strangely accessible to me. The easiest reference for those who’ve never heard of him is Steve Buscemi’s Seymour in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. There’s an obvious tribute to Crumb in the character (Zwigoff previously made an R. Crumb documentary), though it’s certainly not a one-to-one relation (the film adapts Daniel Clowe’s comic of the same name.) Whether or not Ghost World (or Zwigoff’s Crumb) rings a bell, there’s still the matter of how to communicate the lovable lewdness and aggressive anachronism that is Crumb’s art. For that one may only need to mention Big Brother & the Holding Company’s 1968 classic Cheap Thrills (top), the first album cover Crumb designed—and which Janis Joplin insisted upon over the record company’s objections. With its focus on musicians, and its appropriation of hippie weirdness, racist American imagery, and an obsession with female posteriors that rivals Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s, the cover pretty much spans the spectrum of perennial Crumb styles and themes. Above, see another of Crumb’s covers, for a compilation called The Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead, which collects such roots and old-school rock and roll artists as Merle Haggard, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin’ Wolf, and more.   Though he objected to the 1995 assignment—saying to Shanachie Records, "You want all these people on a CD cover? What are they, like, five inches across?"—Crumb must have relished the subject. (And he was paid, as per usual, in vintage 78s.) Next to those posteriors, Crumb’s true love has always been American roots music—ragtime, swing, old country and bluegrass, Delta country blues—and he has spent a good part of his career illustrating artists he loves, and those he doesn’t. From famous names like Joplin, Dylan, and B.B. King (above, whose music Crumb said he "didn’t care for, but I don’t find it that objectionable either"), to much more obscure artists, like Bo Carter, known for his "Please Warm My Wiener," on the 1974 compilation album below. Crumb’s use of racially questionable and sexist imagery—however satirical—has perhaps rendered him untouchable in some circles, and it’s hard to imagine many of his album covers passing corporate muster these days. His recent work has moved toward more straightforward, respectful portraiture, like that of King and of Skip James on the best-of below, from a series called "Heroes of the Blues." (Crumb also illustrated "Heroes of Jazz" and "Heroes of Country," as we featured in this post.) See Crumb’s inimitable, looser portrait style again further down in 2002 album art for a group called Hawks and Eagles. Crumb may have shed some of his more unpalatable tendencies, but he hasn’t lost his lascivious edge. However, his work has matured over the years, taking on serious subjects like the book of Genesis and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For an artist with such peculiar personal focus, Crumb is surprisingly versatile, but it’s his album covers that combine his two greatest loves. "What makes Crumb’s art so appropriate for the album sleeve," writes The Guardian‘s Laura Barton, "is its vividness, and its certain oomph; it’s in the mingling of sex and joy and compulsion, and the vibrancy and movement of his illustrations." Crumb hasn’t only combined his art with music fandom, but also with his own musicianship, illustrating covers for several of his own albums by his ragtime band Cheap Suit Serenaders. And he even provided the illustration for the soundtrack to his own documentary, as you can see above—an extreme example of the many self-abasing portraits Crumb has drawn of himself over the years. Crumb’s album cover art has been collected in a book, and you can see many more of his covers at Rolling Stone and on this list here. Related Content:  R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country Features 114 Illustrations of the Artist’s Favorite Musicians A Short History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Satirist Robert Crumb Cartoonist R. Crumb Assesses 21 Cultural Figures, from Dylan & Hitchcock, to Kafka & The Beatles Ralph Steadman’s Evolving Album Cover Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zappa & Slash (1956-2010)       Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness   http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/r-crumbs-vibrant-over-the-top-album-covers-1968-2004.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.

In the afterglow of the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well concerts, we highlighted The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an online project launched in 1995, which provided editorial footnotes explaining the references of every original Grateful Dead song. For many of these songs we have Robert Hunter to thank. The majority of the Dead’s songs were Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia collaborations. Garcia composed the music, and Hunter, the lyrics. Hunter didn’t perform with the group (Garcia called him "the band member who doesn’t come out on stage with us"), but he was an integral part of the group all the same. When the Dead entered the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Robert Hunter was one of the inductees. Being part of the Grateful Dead family, Hunter sometimes joined the band on tours, which weren’t always fun and games. As Dennis McNally, the Dead’s official historian, wrote in A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, the band, especially as it gained popularity and toured on a bigger scale, pulled some rough and tumble people into its orbit. The business managers made life difficult for the musical purists. And there was dissension at times. At one point, writes McNally, Robert Hunter wrote an open letter to the band members, structured as a sarcastic list, which "identifies the least-charitable aspects of life in the Grateful Dead hierarchy." It reads as follows: The Ten Commandments of Rock & Roll 1. Suck up to the top cats 2. Do not express independent opinions. 3. Do not work for common interests, only factional interests. 4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe. 5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property and personnel. 6. Make devastating judgments about persons and situations without adequate information. 7. Discourage and confound personal, technical, and/or creative projects. 8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism. 9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you. 10 Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity. Related Content: Every Grateful Dead Song Annotated in Hypertext: Web Project Reveals the Deep Literary Foundations of the Dead’s Lyrics The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World 10,173 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive The Grateful Dead’s "Ultimate Bootleg" Now Online & Added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-10-commandments-of-rock-n-roll-according-to-robert-hunter.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 just goes to show that, put in the right hands, you can root, or shed a tear, for any protagonist — even if it’s a plastic bag. Shot in 2009 by Ramin Bahrani (who Roger Ebert called the "new great American director") this 18-minute film "traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it." Adding a special touch, Werner Herzog narrates the inner thoughts of the bag as it "encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world." Plastic Bag was one of 11 films released in the Internet Television Service’s "Futurestates" film series exploring "what life might look like in an America of the future." Upon its release, Herzog told The Guardian, ‘I’m so glad this is not an agenda movie or I would run like mad and get away from here. I mean, we can talk about sustainability issues, about plastic, about the Earth, but the movie’s about something else, something more … it’s about a journey." An emotional, existential one, indeed. You can find Plastic Bag in our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Werner Herzog Offers 24 Pieces of Filmmaking & Life Advice Werner Herzog Picks His 5 Top Films Werner Herzog and Cormac McCarthy Talk Science and Culture http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/werner-herzog-narrates-the-existential-emotional-journey-of-a-plastic-bag.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.

Of all the philosophical concepts Immanuel Kant is known for, the one I’ve had to struggle the least to grasp is his description of the sublime, a state in which we are overawed by the scale of some great work of man or nature. It’s an experience, in typical Kantian fashion, that he explains as being not about the thing itself, but rather the idea of the thing. Yet the concept of the sublime isn’t his. Philosophers from the Greek teacher Longinus in the 1st century to Edmund Burke and other English Enlightenment thinkers in Kant’s own 18th century have had their take on it. For the classical writers, the sublime was rhetorical, for the Brits, it was empirical. But above all, the sublime is peak aesthetics—a supra-rational experience of art or nature one cannot get one’s head around. To be so fully absorbed, so stricken with awe, wonder, and, yes, even fear—all of these philosophers believed in some fashion—is to have an experience critical to transcending our limitations. We may not, in either common speech or academic philosophy, talk much about the sublime these days, but whatever we call the feeling of being absorbed in art, music, or nature, it turns out to have physical benefits as well as mental and emotional. "There seems to be something about awe," says professor of psychology Dacher Keltner. "It seems to have pronounced impact on markers related to inflammation." In other words, immersing yourself in art or nature is good for the joints, and it could possibly preempt various diseases triggered by inflammation. Keltner and his fellow researchers at UC Berkeley conducted a study which found that "awe, wonder and beauty promote [lower and overall] healthier levels of cytokines"—proteins that "signal the immune system to work harder." He goes on to say that "the things we do to experience these emotions—a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art—has [sic] a direct influence upon health and life expectancy." Never mind that Kant and Burke thought of the sublime and the beautiful as two very different things. Whether we become totally overwhelmed by, or just find deep appreciation in an aesthetic experience, the emotions produced "might be just as salubrious as hitting the gym," writes Hyperallergic. That may seem a crude way of thinking about the spiritual and emotional grandeur of the sublime, but it brings our physical being into the discussion in ways many philosophers have neglected. Granted, the researchers themselves admit the causal link is uncertain: it might be better health that leads to more experiences of awe, and not the other way around. But certainly no harm—and a great deal of good—can come from conducting the experiment on yourself. Read an abstract (or purchase a copy) of the Berkeley team’s article here, and learn more about their work with the University’s Greater Good Science Center, which aims to "sponsor groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being." via Hyperallergic Related Content: This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known Free Guided Meditations From UCLA: Boost Your Awareness & Ease Your Stress Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/new-study-immersing-yourself-in-art-music-nature-might-reduce-inflammation-increase-life-expectancy.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 keep up with the animation we post here at Open Culture, you’ll know we have a strong fascination with techniques that require seemingly inhuman levels of devotion to the craft. Sterling earlier examples of that include the pinscreen animation of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker as used to envision Nikolai Gogol’s "The Nose" and Modest Mussorgsky’s "Night on Bald Mountain." More recent practitioners of such severely labor-intensive animation include Nina Paley, the self-taught animated filmmaker who singlehandedly created Sita Sings the Blues, the feature-length jazz-scored adaptation of classic Indian myth we featured in 2009. Since then, Paley has taken her considerable skills to a form she calls "embroidermation." It looks how it sounds: like frame by embroidered frame sequenced into life. You can get an idea of the process at Paley’s blog. She’s done this project under the banner of PaleGray Labs, "the textile collaboration of Nina Paley and Theodore Gray" (whose slogan announces their mission to "put the NERD in quiltiNg and EmbRoiDery"). They used it to make Chad Gadya, a three-minute rendering of a traditional passover folk song. (Below it, you can also see another embroidermation made by another artist for Throne’s song "Tharsis Sleeps.") PaleGray Labs bills Chad Gadya as "our most ridiculously labor-intensive animation ever," which must also make it the most ridiculously labor-intensive animation we’ve yet featured on Open Culture. Its creation required not only formidable embroidery abilities, but a deft hand with industrial-strength number-crunching software Mathematica in order to create the processes that allowed them to animate the stitched figures smoothly. If the results capture your imagination, know that you can purchase the original physical materials: "Each unique, approximately 16″ square, unbleached cotton matzoh cover contains 6 frames of animation and is signed by the artists," PaleGray’s site assures us. Perhaps you’d like to consider stocking up early on gifts for next Passover? Related Content: Nikolai Gogol’s Classic Story, "The Nose," Animated With the Astonishing Pinscreen Technique (1963) Night on Bald Mountain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pinscreen Animation Based on Mussorgsky’s Masterpiece (1933) Sita Sings the Blues 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/nina-paleys-embroidermation.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.

According to singer, songwriter and crowed funder extraordinaire, Amanda Palmer, there’s an "epidemic of mild-mannered British men who say weird shit in their sleep." Her husband, author Neil Gaiman, is no exception. Neil Gaiman is a total weirdo when he’s half asleep. in a GOOD way, usually. you know all that cray shit he’s been writing for the past 30 years? it has to come from *somewhere*. the guy is a fleshy repository of surreal strangeness, and he’s at his best when he’s in the twilight zone of half-wakefulness. he’s the strangest sleeper I’ve ever slept with (let’s not get into who I’ve slept with…different animation) not just because of the bizarro things that come out of his mouth when he’s in the gray area, but because he actually seems to take on a totally different persona when he’s asleep. and when that dude shows up, the waking Neil Gaiman is impossible to get back, unless you really shout him awake. She’s made a habit of jotting down her husband’s choicest somnambulistic mutterings. One paperless night, she repaired to the bathroom to recreate his nocturnal statements on her iPhone’s voice recorder as best she could remember. As someone who’s sorely tempted to get incontrovertible proof of her bedmate’s erratic snoring patterns, I wonder that Palmer wasn’t tempted to hit record mid-rant, and let him hoist himself on his own petard. Revenge does not seem to be the motive here, though. Palmer uses the device as more of a diary, rarely revisiting what she’s laid down. It’s more process than product. That said, when she rediscovered this track, she felt it deserved to be animated, a la the Blank on Blank series. (BrainPicking’s Maria Popova urged her on too.) The ever-game Gaiman reportedly "laughed his head off" at the prospect of getting the Janis Joplin found text treatment. The financial support of some 5,369 fans on the artist-friendly crowd funding platform, Patreon, allowed Palmer  to secure the services of animator Avi Ofer, who reenvisioned the couple as a New Yorker cartoon of sorts. He also managed to squeeze in a deft Little Prince reference. Perhaps his services will be called upon again. Gaiman reports that his very pregnant bride is also prone to nonsensical sleep talk. ("I want to go dancing and i don’t want them to take the sheep, Don’t let them take the sheep.") Turnabout is fair play. Related Content: Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains Watch Lovebirds Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman Sing "Makin’ Whoopee!" Live Amanda Palmer’s Tips for Being an Artist in the Rough-and-Tumble Digital Age Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/amanda-palmer-animates-narrates-husband-neil-gaimans-unconscious-musings.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.

Since George Orwell published his landmark political fable 1984, each generation has found ample reason to make reference to the grim near-future envisioned by the novel. Whether Orwell had some prophetic vision or was simply a very astute reader of the institutions of his day—all still with us in mutated form—hardly matters. His book set the tone for the next 60 plus years of dystopian fiction and film. Orwell’s own political activities—his stint as a colonial policeman or his denunciation of several colleagues and friends to British intelligence—may render him suspect in some quarters. But his nightmarish fictional projections of totalitarian rule strike a nerve with nearly everyone on the political spectrum because, like the speculative future Aldous Huxley created, no one wants to live in such a world. Or at least no one will admit it if they do. Even the institutions most likely to thrive in Orwell’s vision have co-opted his work for their own purposes. The C.I.A. rewrote the animated film version of Animal Farm. And if you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll recall Apple’s appropriation of 1984 in Ridley Scott’s Super Bowl ad that very year for the Macintosh computer. But of course not every Orwell adaptation has been made in the service of political or commercial opportunism. Long before the Apple ad, and Michael Radford’s 1984 film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was the 1949 radio drama above. Starring British great David Niven, with intermission commentary by author James Hilton, the show aired on the educational radio series NBC University Theater. This radio drama, the "first audio production of the most challenging novel of 1949," opens with a trigger warning, of sorts, that prepares us for a "disturbing broadcast." To audiences just on the other side of the Nazi atrocities and the nuclear bombings of Japan, then dealing with the threat of Soviet Communism, Orwell’s dystopian fiction must have seemed dire and disturbing indeed. In addition to the Internet Archive stream at the top, you can download the program in various formats at their site, or listen to it above on Spotify (download Spotify here). Every adaptation of a literary work is unavoidably also an interpretation, bound by the ideas and ideologies of its time. The Niven broadcast shares the same historical concerns as Orwell’s novel. More recently, this nearly 70-year old audio has itself been co-opted by a podcast called "Great Speeches and Interviews," which edited the broadcast together with a perplexing selection of popular songs and an interview between journalists Glenn Greenwald and Dylan Ratigan. A coming new film adaptation first took shape with a collaboration between Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and Barack Obama "Hope" poster designer Shepard Fairey. It has since become a "romantic update" of the novel called Equals, starring Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart—and the project was at one point attached to Paul Greengrass, director of the Bourne films, Captain Phillips, and United 93. Whatever we make of these recent Hollywood developments, one thing seems certain. We won’t be done with Orwell’s 1984 for some time, and it won’t be done with us. Related Content: George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949) Ridley Scott Talks About Making Apple’s Landmark "1984" Commercial, Aired 30 Years Ago on Super Bowl Sunday Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/hear-the-very-first-adaptation-of-george-orwells-1984-in-a-radio-play-starring-david-niven-1949.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.

Underlying image by Gage Skidmore. Echoing Bill Murray, the Urban Dictionary defines sarcasm as "your body’s natural defense against stupid," noting that it’s "the highest form of wit" in countries like the UK, but the lowest in America, owing to the population’s inability to detect whether or not one is being sarcastic. Example: Idiot: I beat up a ten-year-old today. You: (with a hint of sarcasm) That’s impressive! Idiot: I know, right! A new study by Francesca Gino, Adam Galinsky, and Li Huang, of Harvard, Columbia and INSEAD business schools, respectively, suggests that the use of sarcasm promotes creativity for those on the giving and receiving end of sarcastic exchanges. Gino told the Harvard Gazette, "To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking." Galinsky added, the givers and receivers in sarcastic exchanges "subsequently performed better on creativity tasks than those in the sincere conditions or the control condition. This suggests that sarcasm has the potential to catalyze creativity in everyone." "That being said, although not the focus of our research, it is possible that naturally creative people are also more likely to use sarcasm, making it an outcome instead of [a] cause in this relationship." The evidence certainly seems solid in the hands of master practitioners such as Louis CK, Sarah Silverman, and the staff of The Onion, not to mention newcomer Shirley Jester, an animated Sarcastic Foul-Mouthed Teenage Comedian Girl from the Renaissance. Things get a bit murkier when amateurs attempt to adopt their idols’ caustic poses. Tone and intent are easily misconstrued. Feelings get hurt. Is sarcasm best left to the professionals? Not necessarily. Gino and Galinksy found that the degree of trust between expresser and recipient determines how sarcasm is received. In other words, know your audience. Even at its meanest, sarcasm—from the Greek and Latin for "to tear flesh"—involves abstraction, a hallmark of creative thinking. Meanwhile, you can review Clinical Psychologist Chris Fulton’s "Try that again method," below, one of many strategies for handling "sarcastic and sassy teenagers." Creativity be squelched. Cue a million teenage eye rolls, and check out Gino and Galinksy’s findings here. via the Harvard Gazette Related Content: John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play The Psychology of Messiness & Creativity: Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Creative Work Go Hand in Hand The Most "Intellectual Jokes": Our Favorite Open Culture Reader Submissions http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/sarcasm-can-boost-creativity-according-to-research-from-harvard-columbia-business-schools.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.

As brevity in fiction goes, who can top "For sale: baby shoes, never worn"? That much-referenced six-word story, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, certainly packs an impressive amount of human drama into its short length. But what about other genres? What would a six-word science- fiction story look like? i09 crowdsourced countless such works in 2014: responses, which tended toward the eschatological, included "The Universe died. He did not," "New world. Cryogenic failure. Seeds dead," and "Finally sentient, it switched itself off." Not bad, but what would we get if we went to the professionals? Alas, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, prolific author of such respected sci-fi novels as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, passed away just five years before i09 issued its challenge. Still, we have an idea of the direction his entry might have gone in from of "siseneG," a story story — a very short story indeed — Clarke sent in to Analog magazine in 1984: And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN. And the Universe ceased to exist. Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE. It never had existed. "This is the only short story I’ve written in ten years or so," Clarke wrote in the accompanying note. "I think you’ll agree that they don’t come much shorter." We now know that they can come somewhat shorter, at least 25 words shorter than "siseneG," but surely we can all agree that Clarke set a high standard for scientific (or perhaps technological-existential) flash fiction decades before the coinage of the term. But then, we always knew the man had a knack for looking ahead. via Letters of Note Related Content: In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 3D Printers and Trained Monkey Servants Arthur C. Clarke Predicts in 2001 What the World Will Look By December 31, 2100 Arthur C. Clarke Narrates Film on Mandelbrot’s Fractals; David Gilmour Provides the Soundtrack Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman & Beyond 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/read-arthur-c-clarkes-super-short-31-word-sci-fi-story-siseneg.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.

Record label Caedmon Audio specialized in spoken-word recordings, pairing great literary works with great actors. They got James Mason to read the poetry of Robert Browning, multi-Oscar winner Walter Brennan to read the works of Mark Twain and Sir Laurence Olivier to read Winston Churchill. But there were a couple releases, later compiled into one glorious CD set, that is so head-slappingly perfect that it requires special attention: Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price read the works of Edgar Allan Poe over the course of 5 hours. Rathbone was, of course, a South African-born Shakespearean actor who is most famous for playing Sherlock Holmes in a string of films (watch one here) and radio plays, though he was also a veteran star of low-budget horror films like The Black Sheep and Tales of Terror. Vincent Price was, well, Vincent Price - the iconic cackling villain in dozens of horror flicks including Roger Corman’s campy cinematic adaptations of Poe - The House of Usher, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death. The Caedmon recordings, which are now available on Spotify (download the software here) and can be heard above, are pretty much Poe’s greatest hits - from "The Tell-Tale Heart" to "The Pit and Pendulum." Poe’s gothic gloominess pairs brilliantly with Rathbone and Price’s sinister baritone. So get into your favorite smoking jacket, get a fire started, pour yourself a stiff glass of absinthe, set aside a good block of time, and have a listen. Note: Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com, including works by Edgar Allan Poe? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here. Related Content: Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee Watch the 1953 Animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart," Narrated by James Mason Edgar Allan Poe Animated: Watch Four Animations of Classic Poe Stories Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe on His Birthday 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free 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/2015/08/5-hours-of-edgar-allan-poe-stories-read-by-vincent-price-basil-rathbone.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.

Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud: if these theorists share any quality at all, they share a reputation for not going easy on their readers. Each of them wrote in a way that exudes a different kind of intellectual difficulty — Benjamin’s sudden swerves into the zone where high relevance meets high irrelevance, Wittgenstein’s austere certainty, Freud’s elaborate flights into the near-fantastical  — but all of their work poses a challenge to readers approaching it for the first time. And so Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Theory addresses the obvious question: what if you didn’t read it, but heard it sung instead? "What is it about academic theory that begs to be, well, sung by people who can’t sing?" asks Goldsmith, poet, prof, UBUweb creator, and WFMU radio host, on the station’s blog. He cites examples from a punk-rockified Theodor Adorno to a Finnish eccentric’s conversion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into a songbook, eventually coming to his own "adventures into the field," which you can hear in the Pennsound archive. Just above, we have have Goldsmith singing Benjamin’s "Unpacking my Library" to music by experimental violinist Eyvind Kang [MP3]. "Just as Benjamin lists copies of other books and the associations they bring," writes Jacob Edmond at Jacket2, "so Goldsmith copies Benjamin, creating an idiosyncratic audio book version. " Wittgenstein Part 1 Wittgenstein Part 2 "In his performance of the text, Goldsmith fuses precisely delineated musical sections, or movements, with the chaotic, shifting pitch and tone of his voice, paralleling Benjamin’s observation in the essay that ‘if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.'" Can you find similar parallels between Goldsmith’s manner of singing and the theory he delivers with it when he performs Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to Igor Stravinsky [MP3 part one, MP3 part two]? Or below, where he sings Sigmund Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, starting on the passage of the "slips of the tongue" which have popularly come to bear Freud’s name, to The Who [MP3]? After all, style doesn’t count for much, as such a strikingly dressed character as Goldsmith knows full well, unless it aligns with substance. Related Content: Walter Benjamin’s Mystical Thought Presented by Two Experimental Films Walter Benjamin’s Radio Plays for Kids (1929-1932) Wittgenstein’s Masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Gets Turned into Beautiful, Meditative Music Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera Sigmund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Recording of His Voice, 1938 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/the-theory-of-walter-benjamin-ludwig-wittgenstein-sigmund-freud-sung-by-kenneth-goldsmith.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.

An old musician’s joke goes "there are three kinds of drummers in the world—those who can count and those who can’t." But perhaps there is an even more global divide. Perhaps there are three kinds of people in the world—those who can drum and those who can’t. Perhaps, as the promotional video above from GE suggests, drummers have fundamentally different brains than the rest of us. Today we highlight the scientific research into drummers’ brains, an expanding area of neuroscience and psychology that disproves a host of dumb drummer jokes. "Drummers," writes Jordan Taylor Sloan at Mic, "can actually be smarter than their less rhythmically-focused bandmates." This according to the findings of a Swedish study (Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm) which shows "a link between intelligence, good timing and the part of the brain used for problem-solving." As Gary Cleland puts it in The Telegraph, drummers "might actually be natural intellectuals." Neuroscientist David Eagleman, a renaissance researcher The New Yorker calls "a man obsessed with time," found this out in an experiment he conducted with various professional drummers at Brian Eno’s studio. It was Eno who theorized that drummers have a unique mental makeup, and it turns out "Eno was right: drummers do have different brains from the rest." Eagleman’s test showed "a huge statistical difference between the drummers’ timing and that of test subjects." Says Eagleman, "Now we know that there is something anatomically different about them." Their ability to keep time gives them an intuitive understanding of the rhythmic patterns they perceive all around them. That difference can be annoying—like the pain of having perfect pitch in a perpetually off-key world. But drumming ultimately has therapeutic value, providing the emotional and physical benefits collectively known as "drummer’s high," an endorphin rush that can only be stimulated by playing music, not simply listening to it. In addition to increasing people’s pain thresholds, Oxford psychologists found, the endorphin-filled act of drumming increases positive emotions and leads people to work together in a more cooperative fashion. Clash drummer Topper Headon discusses the therapeutic aspect of drumming in a short BBC interview above. He also calls drumming a "primeval" and distinctly, universally human activity. Former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley have high hopes for the science of rhythm. Hart, who has powered a light show with his brainwaves in concerts with his own band, discusses the "power" of rhythm to move crowds and bring Alzheimer’s patients back into the present moment. Whether we can train ourselves to think and feel like drummers may be debatable. But as for whether drummers really do think in ways non-drummers can’t, consider the neuroscience of Stewart Copeland’s polyrhythmic beats, and the work of Terry Bozzio (below) playing the largest drumkit you’ve ever seen. Related Content: Playing an Instrument Is a Great Workout For Your Brain: New Animation Explains Why Isolated Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Greatest: Bonham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-neuroscience-of-drumming.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.

Click here to view the infographic in a larger format. From the December 6, 1938 issue of LOOK magazine comes this vintage "infographic" showing "The Wonders Within Your Head." It takes the human brain/head and presents it as a series of rooms, each carrying out a different function. Drawn a little more than a decade after Calvin Coolidge famously declared "The business of America is business," it’s not surprising that the cognitive functions are depicted in corporate or industrial terms. Besides for this visualization, the same edition of LOOK featured articles on Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, President Roosevelt, and the Tragedy of the European Jews. Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," had taken place a month before in Nazi Germany — another sign that the world was about to become a very, very dark place. 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: The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic Download 78 Free Online History Courses: From Ancient Greece to The Modern World 4000 Years of History Displayed in a 5-Foot-Long "Histomap" (Early Infographic) From 1931 Free Online Biology Courses http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-wonders-within-your-head-a-vintage-infographic-of-the-human-brain-1938.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.

Even by the standards of United States Presidents, Barack Obama has led a pretty unusual life. His early experiences included a childhood plunge into internationalism in the form of not just his Kenyan father but his Indonesian stepfather, to whose homeland the family moved when Obama was six years old. For the next four years, the young future Commander in Chief attended local schools in Jakarta, and the language he picked up then has stuck with him today. It certainly served him well when he returned to Indonesia as President to give the speech above, in which he talks about his love for that country and his belief in its importance to the future, speaking bits and pieces in Indonesian throughout — and drawing great applause each time. If you want to be like Barry and meet with a similarly rapturous reception when next you give a public address in the Emerald of the Equator, start by learning the basics of the Indonesian language at our Free Foreign Language Lessons page. There, you’ll find a wealth of podcasts like Learning Indonesian (iTunes), Indonesianpod101 (iTunes), and Indonesian Survival Phrases (iTunes). [Advanced learners might prefer tuning in to news-in-Indonesian podcasts from SBS (iTunes) and NHK World (iTunes) radio.] Indonesianpod101 even has a Youtube page with video lessons like the one just above. Even if you don’t plan on becoming President, you may still have plenty of reasons to learn Indonesian. With its familiar alphabet and simple grammar without tenses, gender forms, noun cases, and the like, it ranks as one of the very easiest languages in which to attain fluency. I know an American college professor in South Korea who constantly urges his students to study Indonesian, since it offers the "golden tip" of a wedge into the rest of Asia: master it, and you’ll have built up momentum to learn the other, more complicated languages of the region, from Mandarin to Cantonese to Japanese and beyond — all of which you can also begin studying at, of course, our Free Language Lessons page. If your linguistic interests slant toward Europe rather than Asia, don’t worry, we’ve still got your back: our lists include learning resources for languages of that continent as major as Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, English, and German to niche languages like Catalan, Finnish, Hungarian, and Serbo-Croatian. If you notice we’ve missed any language you’ve harbored a burning desire to learn, drop us a line so we can start gathering podcasts, videos, and PDFs on it. In the meantime, surely the Free Language Lessons page offers you something to start on and get that incomparable feeling of breaking into a new language for the first time. Semoga beruntung, as we say in Jakarta! Related Content: Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More Study 40+ Languages with Free Lessons from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute Let’s Learn Japanese: Two Classic Video Series to Get You Started in the Language Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons 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/learn-to-speak-48-languages-for-free.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.