With the possible exception of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, few works of philosophy confront the barrenness of human life in the modern world in bleaker terms than Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Taking its title from Aristotle’s Magna Moralia, or "The Great Ethics," Adorno’s book subverts the classical idea of the good life as a realistic aspiration in a world dominated by totalitarian systems of control and inexorable, grinding logics of production and consumption. "Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer," writes Adorno in his Dedication. The individual has been "reduced and degraded" by capitalism and fascism, flattened to mere appearance in the "sphere of consumption." Adorno’s book—a philosophical memoir of his experience as an "intellectual in emigration"—reflects his pessimism not only in its title but also in its subtitle: Reflections from Damaged Life. How little he could have suspected—and how much he likely would have despised—the kinship between his own postwar angst and the neurotic anger of the American hardcore punk generation to come some thirty-five years later. Take, for example these lyrics to Black Flag’s "Damaged," from their 1981 album of the same name: Right now look at me now Look at me now Just shadows I’m just shadows of what I was I just want another thing I don’t even get by for that One might make the case that Black Flag lyrics—and those of so many similar bands—play out Adorno’s thesis over and over: to quote a much less angry pop band from a later generation: "Modern Life is Rubbish." Seizing on these pessimistic parallels between punk rock and critical theory, filmmaker and artist Brian J. Davis recorded an EP of readings from five chapters of Adorno’s book, set to blistering hardcore drums and guitars. (Anyone happen to know who is on vocals?) Above, hear "They, The People," and "This Side of the Pleasure Principle" and below, we have "UNmeasure for UNmeasure," "Johnny Head-in-the-Air," and "Every Work is an Uncommitted Crime." As you’ll note, Adorno’s titles allude to well-known works of art, politics, folk song, and theory and—as the publisher’s note in my Verso edition puts it— "involve irony or inversion," primary rhetorical methods of his "negative dialectic." The hardcore punks who picked up, however unconsciously, on Adorno’s disaffected critique may have eschewed his self-consciously literary approach, but they were no less masters of irony, even if their targets happened to be much more pop-cultural. Punk rock Adorno comes to us from WFMU’s Kenneth S as examples of "academic theory… sung by people who can’t sing." As Colin Marshall pointed out in a post yesterday, Goldsmith has made his own contribution to the genre, singing writings by Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud. And to even more humorous effect, we’ve previously brought you the work of M.A. Numminen, Finnish performance artist who turned Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into a bizarre comic opera. For a much more serious look at Adorno and music—a subject he wrote passionately and controversially about—check out this post on his own avant-garde compositions, which turn out to be much less punk rock than one might expect given his social alienation and despondency. Related Content: The Theory of Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein & Sigmund Freud Sung by Kenneth Goldsmith Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musical Compositions Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of Punctuation Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/theodor-adornos-seminal-critical-theory-text-minima-moralia-sung-as-hardcore-punk-songs.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.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, started writing at the end of World War II and the beginning of the nuclear age, a time when technology promised to bring untold benefit to humanity and had the potential to utterly destroy it. So he wrote science fiction with some actual science in it, tales about space travel, alien encounters and human evolution. The future was a continuing object of fascination for Clarke. He proved to be uncannily accurate at making divinations about the course of technology. Back in 1964, he predicted virtual surgery, 3D printers and the internet. Of course, he also predicted that we would have an army of monkey servants to cater to our every whim. You can’t always be right. But thanks to the magic of one of his predictions - the internet - you can listen to Clarke read two of his most acclaimed works - Childhood’s End and "The Star." The former tale, written in 1953, is about a mysterious alien race that brings the Cold War to a screeching halt and kick starts human evolution. But at what cost? Stanley Kubrick was reportedly interested in developing the book until he settled on 2001. Listen to Clarke read long excerpts from Childhood’s End at the top of this post. The latter story, published in 1955, might very well be the best sci-fi Christmas story ever. It was adapted into a Twilight Zone episode that thoroughly freaked me out as a kid. Listen to "The Star" just above. Related Content: Arthur C. Clarke Narrates Film on Mandelbrot’s Fractals; David Gilmour Provides the Soundtrack Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014 Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman & Beyond 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/arthur-c-clarke-reads.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.

Long before I started Open Culture I was a fan of The Great Courses, formerly called The Teaching Company. If you’re not familiar with them, the company travels across the US, recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. The courses are very polished and stimulating (I’ve personally purchased almost 20 courses over the years), and they have typically been sold in an "à la carte" fashion. Now, The Great Courses is working on rolling out a new model, and Open Culture readers can give it an early test drive for free. The company will soon launch The Great Courses Plus, a new video subscription learning service that offers unlimited access to 5,000 lectures from a library of courses — courses covering History, Philosophy, Literature, Economics, Math, Science, Professional Development, Cooking & Wine, Photography and much more. Choosing what they want to watch, when they want to watch, subscribers can stream lectures on computer web browsers, mobile web browsers, and apps designed for Apple, Google Play, Kindle Fire, and Roku. The general public won’t have access to this new service until the fall, but our readers (the first 250 1500) can sign up for a free beta test of The Great Courses Plus. To get your free subscription, visit www.TheGreatCoursesPlus.com; enter your email address and the code OPENCULTURE in the orange box on the home page; click ‘Submit;’ and then finish the sign-up process. [Note: the code OPENCULTURE is not case sensitive, I’m told.] The sign-up process does require a credit card to ensure you are a real person, but you will not be charged now or in the future. The beta is expected to last until late September. When the beta test is finished, your subscription will be cancelled and you will be under no obligation to join. Again, The Great Courses has given us 250 1500 free slots, so if you’re interested, get cracking soon. For more coverage of The Great Courses Plus initiative, see an article just published in USA Today. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/get-a-free-subscription-to-the-beta-version-of-the-great-courses-plus.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 we highlighted a few days ago, recent findings by South African scientists suggest that William Shakespeare may have smoked pot, possibly composing some of his celebrated plays while under the influence. Their research is sure to spark controversy among Shakespeare scholars and historians alike, but it’s certainly a more interesting controversy than the tired debate about whether Shakespeare wrote his plays at all. Perhaps even more interesting than Shakespeare’s drug of choice for lovers of his language are debates about what Shakespeare’s plays might have sounded like to his original audiences. In other words, high or not, what might Shakespeare, his actors, and his audience have sounded like when they spoke the language we call English. Of course they called the language English as well, but we might not recognize some words as such when hearing Shakespeare’s accent aloud. On the other hand, it might be surprising just how much the Bard’s original pronunciation sounds like so many other kinds of English we know today. In a post two years ago, we quoted Shakespearean actor, director, and writer Ben Crystal on Shakespeare’s original pronunciation, which, he says, "has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too." Hearing Shakespeare’s English spoken aloud, Crystal remarks, is hearing a sound that "reminds people of the accent of their home." You can test this theory, and hear for yourself the sound of Shakespeare’s English with the video and audio highlighted here, showcasing Crystal’s performance of the plays in original pronunciation (OP). At the top, see Crystal recite an excerpt of Hamlet’s "to be or not to be" speech in a video promotion for a 2011 Kickstarter campaign to fund a film version of Hamlet in OP. And above, we have two audio clips of Richard III and King Lear, respectively, both from an OP Shakespeare CD Crystal recorded with several other actors. Crystal came by his version of original pronunciation honestly, and from a very reputable source, who also happens to be his father, David. The elder Crystal is perhaps the most highly-regarded linguist and scholar of the English language alive today, and in addition to publishing several books both scholarly and popular, he has worked with the Globe Theatre on producing plays in OP since 1994. Learn more about Crystal’s process at our previous post on his work. Below, in an excerpt from a much longer talk, see Ben Crystal describe and demonstrate the differences between "Received Pronunciation"—the "proper," generic form of British English—and Shakespeare’s pronunciation. He then discusses with his audience the ways Shakespeare’s English seems to roam all over the map, hewing to no particular British region or class. Related Content: What Shakespeare Sounded Like to Shakespeare: Reconstructing the Bard’s Original Pronunciation Discover What Shakespeare’s Handwriting Looked Like, and How It Solved a Mystery of Authorship A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Performed by Great Actors: Gielgud, McKellen & More Free Online Shakespeare Courses: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/hear-what-hamlet-richard-iii-king-lear-sounded-like-in-shakespeares-original-pronunciation.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.

Artist and music producer Brian Eno wrote one of my very favorite books: A Year with Swollen Appendices, which takes the form of his personal diary of the year 1995 with essayistic chapters (the "swollen appendices") on topics like "edge culture," generative music, new ways of singing, pretension, CD-ROMs (a relevant topic back then), and payment structures for recording artists (a relevant topic again today). It also includes a fair bit of Eno’s correspondence with Stewart Brand, once editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and now president of the Long Now Foundation, "a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture" meant to "help make long-term thinking more common" and "creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." It so happens that Eno now sits on the Long Now Foundation’s board and has had a hand in some of its projects. Naturally, he contributed suggested reading material to the foundation’s Manual of Civilization, a collection of books humanity could use to rebuild civilization, should it need rebuilding. Eno’s full list, which spans history, politics, philosophy, sociology, architecture, design, nature, and literature, runs as follows: Seeing Like a State by James C Scott The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al The Face of Battle by John Keegan A History of the World in 100 Objects by  Neil MacGregor Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty The Notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci The Confidence Trap by David Runciman The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Hrdy War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) by Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe by Marjorie Blamey & Christopher Grey Wilson Printing and the Mind of Man by John Carter & Percy Muir Peter the Great: His Life and World by Richard Massie If you’d like to know more books that have shaped Eno’s thinking, do pick up a copy of A Year with Swollen Appendices. Like all the best diarists, Eno makes plenty of references to his day-to-day reading material, and at the very end — beyond the last swollen appendix — he includes a bibliography, on which you’ll find more from Christopher Alexander, a reappearance of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, and even Steward Brand’s own How Buildings Learn (on a television version of which the two would collaborate): Best Ideas: A Compendium of Social Innovation edited by Nicholas Albery A Foreshadowing of the 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets by Christopher Alexander Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andric Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber The Artful Universe by John Barrow Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt The Creators by Daniel Boorstin Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery edited by B.A. Botkin How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel The Transformation of War by Martin van Creveld The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett Defence Policy Making edited by G.M. Dillon Women En Large: Image of Fat Nudes by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks Trust by Francis Fukuyama Edge City by Joel Garreau Ecce Homo by George Grosz Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall Managing the Commons by Garrett Hardin and John Baden The Middle Ages by Friedrich Herr Going Bugs by James Hillman Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johann Huizinga The State We’re In by Will Hutton Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization by Kevin Kelly Wild Blue Yonder by Nick Krotz Fetish Girls by Eric Kroll The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Artificial Life by Steven Levy Planetary Overload by A.J. McMichael Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte Erotica Universalis by Gilles Neret Living Without a Goal by Jay Ogilvy Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje Evolution of Consciousness by Robert E. Ornstein Art and Pornography and Man’s Rage for Chaos by Morse Peckham Works and Texts by Tom Phillips The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker In Search of a Better World by Karl Popper Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone Postcards by Annie Proulx Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain I am That: Conversations with Sri Nisaragadatta Maharaj Face of the Gods and Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson Ocean of Sound by David Toop The Seven Cultures of Capitalism by Charles Hampden Turner Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West Art and Anarchy by Edgar Wind Related Content: David Bowie’s Top 100 Books Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s "Oblique Strategies" Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989) What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civilization?: Lists by Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly & Other Forward-Thinking Minds What Books Should Every Intelligent Person Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors (Download Them 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/brian-eno-book-lists.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.

This is usually what happens when I write a piece for Open Culture: As I drink an overpriced coffee at my local coffee shop, I research a topic on the internet, write and edit an article on Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the whole thing into WordPress. My editor in Open Culture’s gleaming international headquarters up in Palo Alto gives it a look-over and then, with the push of a button, publishes the article on the site. It’s sobering to think what I casually do over the course of a morning would require the effort of dozens of people 40 years ago. Until the 1970s, with the rise in popularity of computer typesetting, newspapers were printed the same way for nearly a century. Linotype machines would cast one line at a time from molten lead. Though an improvement from handset type, where printers would assemble lines of type one character at a time, linotype still required numerous skilled printers to assemble each and every newspaper edition. The New York Times transitioned from that venerated production method to computer typesetting on Sunday, July 2, 1978. David Loeb Weiss, a proofreader at the Times, documented this final day in the documentary Farewell - Etaoin Shrdlu. The title of the movie, by the way, comes from the first two lines of a printer’s keyboard, which are arranged according to a letter’s frequency of use. When a printer typed "etaoin shrdlu," it meant that the line had a mistake in it and should be discarded. Watching the movie, you get a sense of just how much work went into each page and how printers were skilled craftsmen. (You try spotting a typo on a page of upside down and backwards type.) The film also captures the furious energy and the cacophony of clinks and clanks of the composing room. You can see just how much physical work was involved. After all, each page was printed off of a 40-pound plate made of lead. The tone of the movie is understandably melancholy. The workers are bidding farewell to a job that had existed for decades. "All the knowledge I’ve acquired over my 26 years is all locked up in a little box now called a computer," notes one printer. "And I think most jobs are going to end up the same way." Someone else wrote the following on the composing room’s chalkboard. "The end of an era. Good while it lasted. Crying won’t help." You can watch the full documentary above. It will also be added to our list of 200 Free Documentaries, a subset of our meta collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. H/T @KirstinButler Related Content: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curious Typewriter, the "Malling-Hansen Writing Ball" 53 New York Times Videos Teach Essential Cooking Techniques: From Poaching Eggs to Shucking Oysters The Art of Collotype: See a Near Extinct Printing Technique, as Lovingly Practiced by a Japanese Master Craftsman Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter 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/the-end-of-an-era-a-short-film-about-the-last-day-of-hot-metal-typesetting-at-the-new-york-times-1978.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 does seem possible, I think, to overvalue the significance of a writer’s library to his or her own literary productions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have greatly influenced us. What we keep or don’t keep can be as much a matter of happenstance or sentiment as deliberate personal archiving. But while we may not always be conscious curators of our lives’ effects, those effects still speak for us when we are gone in ways we may never have intended. In the case of famous—and famously controversial—thinkers like Hannah Arendt, what is left behind will always constitute a body of evidence. And in some cases—such as that of Arendt’s teacher and onetime lover Martin Heidegger’s glaringly anti-Semitic Black Notebooks—the evidence can be irrevocably damning. In Arendt’s case, we have no such smoking gun to substantiate arguments that, despite her own background, Arendt was anti-Jewish and blamed the victims of the Holocaust. During the so-called "Eichmann wars" in the mid-twentieth century, a torrent of criticism bombarded Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the compilation of dispatches she penned as an observer of the Nazi arch-bureaucrat’s trial. These days, writes Corey Robin in The Nation, "while the controversy over Eichmann remains, the controversialists have moved on." The debate now seems more centered on Arendt’s book itself than on her motivations. What do Arendt’s observations reveal to us today about the logic of totalitarianism and genocidal state actions? One way to approach the questions of meaning in Eichmann, and in her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism, is to examine the sources of her thought—and her use of those sources. Arendt’s library—much of it on view online thanks to Bard college—offers us a unique opportunity to do just that, not only by giving us access to the specific editions and translations that she herself read and saved (for whatever reason), but also by offering insight into what Arendt considered important enough in those texts to underline and annotate. In Bard’s digital collection of "Arendt Marginalia"—selections of her annotated books in downloadable PDFs—we see a political philosophy informed by Aristotle (see a page from her copy of Nicomachean Ethics above), Plato, and Kant, but also by conservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt, a member and active supporter of Nazism, and of course, by Heidegger, whose work occupies a central place in her library: in German and English (like his Early Greek Thinking above, inscribed by the translator), and in primary and secondary sources. While it may go too far to claim, as prominent scholar Bernard Wasserstein did in 2009, that an examination of Arendt’s sources shows her internalizing the values of Nazis and anti-Semites, the preponderance of conservative German thinkers in her personal library does give us a sense of her intellectual leanings. But we cannot draw broad conclusions from a cursory survey of a lifetime of reading and re-reading, though we do see a particularly Aristotelian strain in her thinking: that the individual is only as healthy as his or her political culture. What scholars of Arendt will find in Bard’s digital collection are ample clues to the development and evolution of her philosophy over time. What lay readers will find is the outline of a course on the sources of Arendt-ian thought, including not only Greeks and Germans, but the American poet Robert Lowell, who wrote a glowing profile of Arendt and contributed at least four signed books of his to her library. I say "at least" because the Bard digital collection is yet incomplete, representing only a portion of the physical media in the college’s physical archive of "approximately 4,000 volumes, ephemera and pamphlets that made up the library in Hannah Arendt’s last apartment in New York City." What we don’t have online are books inscribed to her by Jewish scholar and mystic Gershom Scholem, by W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, and many others. Nonetheless the "Arendt Marginalia" gives us an opportunity to peer into a writer and scholar’s process, and see her wrestle with the thought of her predecessors and contemporaries. The full Arendt collection gives us even more to sift through, including private correspondence and recordings of public speeches. The digitization of these sources offers many opportunities for those who cannot travel to New York and access the physical archives to delve into Arendt’s intellectual world in ways previously only available to professional academics. Related Contents: Enter the Hannah Arendt Archives & Discover Rare Audio Lectures, Manuscripts, Marginalia, Letters, Postcards & More Hannah Arendt Discusses Philosophy, Politics & Eichmann in Rare 1964 TV Interview Hannah Arendt’s Original Articles on "the Banality of Evil" in the New Yorker Archive Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/a-look-inside-hannah-arendts-personal-library-download-marginalia-from-90-books-heidegger-kant-marx-more.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. %%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.

Now free for the world to see on the Cambridge University Digital Library are some treasures from the library’s Chinese collections. Fire up that time machine called the Internet, and you can start perusing: The oracle bones (pieces of ox shoulder blades and turtle shells used for divination in ancient China) which importantly bear the earliest surviving examples of Chinese writing. They’re over three thousand years old. A digitization of one of the world’s earliest printed books (Mahapraj馻-paramita-sutra or Perfection of Wisdom), a Buddhist text dating between 1127 and 1175. A 14th-century banknote. According to Cambridge, "Paper currency first appeared in China during the 7th century, and was in wide circulation by the 11th century, 500 years before its first use in Europe." But what’s been burning up the Internet during the past few days (largely thanks to Hyperallergic) is the digitization of the Manual of Calligraphy and Painting. Made in 1633 in Nanjing, the Manual of Calligraphy and Painting is noteworthy partly because "It is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers." And partly because "The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it - despite its undoubted importance to scholars," says Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University Library. Begin your digital tour of the 388-page Manual here (or see a few samples above) and be among the first to lay eyes on it. via Hyperallergic/Book Patrol/Cambridge University Library Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/one-of-worlds-oldest-books-printed-in-multi-color-now-opened-digitized-for-the-first-time.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.

Millions watched as astronaut Neil Armstrong put boots to the moon in 1969. It was, as he famously remarked, one "giant leap for mankind," but from a scientific standpoint the territory was far from virgin. Nearly 300 years earlier, engineer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, astronomer to Sun King Louis XIV, made lunar history in 1679, when he published the first scientific map of the moon, above. Needless to say, the event was not televised and Cassini never had the opportunity to walk on the surface he studied. Instead he observed it through the eyepiece of a telescope, a relatively new invention. His predecessors, including Galileo, used the then-revolutionary tool to delve deeper into their own lunar obsessions, making sketches and performing experiments designed to replicate the craters they noticed in the moon’s crust. Cassini, then eight years into his forty year career as Director of the Paris Observatory, produced a map so exhaustive, it provided his peers with far more details of the moon’s surface than they had with regard to their own planet. He also used his powers of observation to expand human understanding of Mars, Saturn, and France itself (which turned out to be much smaller than previously believed).   A man of science, he may not have been entirely immune to the sort of moon-based whimsy that has long infected poets, songwriters, and 19th-century romantic heroines. Hiding in the lower right quadrant, near Cape Heraclides on the Sinus Iridum (aka Bay of Rainbows), is a tiny, bare-shouldered moon maid. See right above. Or perhaps this appealingly playful vision can be attributed to Cassini’s engraver Claude Mellan. Either way, she seems exactly the sort of female life form a 17th-century human male might hope to encounter on a trip to the moon. via Pickover Reality Carnival Related Content: Free Online Astronomy Courses Galileo’s Moon Drawings, the First Realistic Depictions of the Moon in History (1609-1610) The Birth of the Moon: How Did It Get There in the First Place? Michio Kaku Schools Takes on Moon Landing-Conspiracy Believer on His Science Fantastic Podcast Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-first-scientific-map-of-the-moon-1679-can-you-spot-the-secret-moon-maiden.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 haven’t yet seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris but do plan on watching it (find it online here), rest assured that there’s no wrong way to go about it. You can plunge, without preparation, right into its vivid, tormented Soviet sci-fi world of failing high technology, sublime natural forces, and haunting memory. You can do no end of preliminary research on the film, its maker, and its maker’s struggle to adapt the original Stanislaw Lem novel to his own distinctive sensibility. Or you could just precede your screening with "Auteur in Space," a brief examination of Solaris by well-known cinephile video essayist kogonada.  It was made on behalf of The British Film Institute. "The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb," the narrator quotes Tarkovsky as writing, going on to cite his criticism of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 "for being too enamored by the spectacle of the genre, for being too exotic, too immaculate." From then on, the video demonstrates not just what Tarkovsky does to push Solaris out of the shadow of 2oo1, but also to break it out of the standard forms of science fiction and, ultimately, to free it from the strictures of genre itself — to occupy that category we can only call Tarkovsky. And so the Russian auteur decides to make the space station on which most of the film takes place "look like a broken-down old bus." He decides "to spend five minutes showing a man in an ordinary car traveling along the highway, and less than two minutes showing his main character traveling through space." He gives in to his "occupation with the elemental things of Earth." He comes to "question the limits of science in engaging the mysteries of existence," ultimately using Solaris to pit science against fiction, "each with their own weight and history and pursuit of truth and knowledge." If, indeed, you haven’t yet seen Solaris and watch this video essay, you’ll surely find yourself no longer able to resist the temptation to experience the film as soon as possible. Maybe you’ll pop in the DVD or Blu-Ray, or better yet, maybe you’ll catch a theatrical screening. But if you understandably can’t wait for even a moment, you can watch it free online right now. And find other Tarkovsky films free online here. via io9 Related Content: Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a "Phony" Film "With Only Pretensions to Truth" Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunting Vision of the Future Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Breakdown of the Director’s Filmmaking The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema A Poet in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Filmmaking and Life 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/video-essay-on-how-andrei-tarkovskys-solaris-transcends-science-fiction.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.

Like much of the rest of the country, President Obama is getting some downtime in August — in his case spending 16 days in Martha’s Vineyard. From that nice getaway spot, POTUS has launched on Spotify (download the free software here) two playlists of music — 20 songs for a hot summer day, and another 20 for a nice summer evening. You can play the songs below, and further down the page, find six books on his summer vacation reading list. Daytime listening features songs from Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Coldplay, Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin, Florence and the Machine, and The Rolling Stones. For nighttime, he’s serving up John Coltrane, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and more. The man has taste. And for summer reading you can do worse than offer Jhumpa Lahiri, James Salter and Elizabeth Kolbert. "The President’s Summer Playlist: Day" "The President’s Summer Playlist: Night" Obama’s Summer Reading List: All That Is, by James Salter All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/pres-obama-releases-a-hip-playlist-of-40-songs-for-a-summer-day.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 are bombarded by music, all the time, whether we like it or not. In many cases—such as those almost daily, inescapable trips to the grocery store, drug store, pet store, what-have-you store—the musical accompaniment to our journey through life has been chosen specifically for its ability to make us buy things: However grating we may find the soft rock, lite pop, or easy listening that pumps out of pharmacy speaker systems, some sinister cabal of marketing researchers determined long ago that schmaltz equals sales. And so we endure yet another terrible pop song while waiting in line with our essentials. For people like myself—highly sensitive to sound and unable to tune out bad background music—the experience can be excruciating. In our own private spaces—offices, cars, the space between our ears with headphones on—we become our own sound designers. We may prefer silence, or we may choose very specific kinds of music to accompany our leisure and our work (as we discussed in a few posts on music to write by some years back). These days, we can make our own digital playlists, grabbing music from all over the web, or we can have the algorithms of internet radio services like Pandora or Apple Radio curate our listening for us, a more—or sometimes less—satisfying experience. Lovers of classical music have a third online option, thanks to an enterprising digital curator who goes by the name of Ulyssestone and who compiled the Spotify playlist above of 58 hours of classical music — from Sibelius to Satie, Bach to Debussy. It’s designed for anyone who wants to study, work, or simply relax. Ulysses has previously brought us a playlist of the enduringly classical music in Stanley Kubrick’s films and all of Mozart in a 127 hour playlist. As one music blogger put it, his interventions have made Spotify’s service "a whole lot easier for classical listeners." See for yourself at Spotify Classical Playlists, where you’ll find blog posts on the changes to Spotify’s classical radio, as well as over 50 playlists dedicated to famous composers—"great starting points," writes Ulysses, "for people who want to get into classical music or explore a bit more." You can stream the 58-hour playlist of study-enhancing classical music (featuring 789 free tracks in total) by clicking this link, or streaming the player above. To download Spotify and start a free account, head on over to their site. Related Content: Download Free Music from 150+ Classical Composers, Courtesy of Musopen.org The World Concert Hall: Listen To The Best Live Classical Music Concerts for Free The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/stream-58-hours-of-classical-music-for-studying-working-or-simply-relaxing.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.

Beautiful city, shame about all those Nazis. Yes, this color newsreel above shows Berlin in 1936 as it gets ready to welcome the world for the Olympic Games. It’s a PR film meant to show the upside of the Reich, as Germans looked forward to a "better future", and indeed the city looks just as gorgeous and exciting as other bustling European metropolises. There’s new construction alongside the classical architecture. There’s couples dancing to the latest hit tunes—Malneck and Mercer’s "Goody Goody" (which Benny Goodman had just released in February). There’s young men frolicking in the Wannsee while ladies sunbathe. But then there’s those Nazis, ruining everybody’s travel plans. The streets are "festively decorated with flags with the current pattern" (ie. the swastika); we see a group of Hitler youth on a parade for the Führer; and while the "changing of the guard" may put some in mind of Buckingham Palace, here they’ve got the full goose-stepping going on. And the film ends very oddly: a shot of the guards outside the Ministry of Aviation, home to morphine addict and concentration camp co-creator Hermann Göering. Flash forward to July 1945, and what a difference surrender to the Allies makes: Berlin in ruins, large posters of Stalin, and the signs of the divisions that eventually end in the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall. The newsreel concludes with a dramatic aerial shot of the entire city, taking in the amount of destruction. We’ve featured this 1945 film before, but this before-and-after comparison speaks to the devastation of war and the determination to rebuild. Related Content Berlin Street Scenes Beautifully Caught on Film (1900-1914) 1,000,000 Minutes of Newsreel Footage by AP & British Movietone Released on YouTube Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945 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/see-berlin-before-and-after-world-war-ii-in-vivid-startling-color.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.

Ecce panis—try your hand at the kind of loaf that Mel Brooks’ 2000-year-old man might have sunk his teeth into. Literally. In 1930 a loaf of bread dating to AD 79 (the year Vesuvius claimed two prosperous Roman towns) was excavated from the site of a bakery in Herculaneum. Eighty-three years later, the British Museum invited London chef Giorgio Locatelli, above, to take a stab at creating an edible facsimile for its Pompeii Live exhibition. The assignment wasn’t as easy as he’d anticipated, the telegenic chef confesses before whipping up a lovely brown miche that appears far more mouth watering than the carbonized round found in the Herculaneum oven. His recipe could be mistaken for modern sourdough, but he also has a go at several details that speak to bread’s role in ancient Roman life: Its perimeter has a cord baked in to provide for easy transport home. Most Roman homes were without ovens. Those who didn’t buy direct from a bakery took their dough to community ovens, where it was baked for them overnight. The loaf was scored into eight wedges. This is true of the 80 loaves found in the ovens of the unfortunate baker, Modestus. Locatelli speculates that the wedges could be used as monetary units, but I suspect it’s more a business practice on par with pizza-by-the-slice. (Nowadays, Roman pizza is sold by weight, but I digress.) The crust bears a telltale stamp. Locatelli takes the opportunity to brand his with the logo of his Michelin-starred restaurant, Locanda Locatelli. His inspiration is stamped ‘Property of Celer, Slave of Q. Granius Verus.’ To me, this suggests the possibility that the bread was found in a communal oven. Locatelli also introduces a Flintstonian vision when he alludes to specially-devised labor saving machines to which Roman bakers yoked "animals," presumably donkeys…or knowing the Romans and their class system, slaves. His published recipe (a variation of the one in the video) is below.  Here is a conversion chart for those unfamiliar with metric measurements. INGREDIENTS 400g biga acida (sourdough) 12g yeast 18g gluten 24g salt 532g water 405g spelt flour 405g wholemeal flour Melt the yeast into the water and add it into the biga. Mix and sieve the flours together with the gluten and add to the water mix. Mix for two minutes, add the salt and keep mixing for another three minutes. Make a round shape with it and leave to rest for one hour. Put some string around it to keep its shape during cooking. Make some cuts on top before cooking to help the bread rise in the oven and cook for 30-45 minutes at 200 degrees. For an even more artisanal attempt (and extremely detailed instructions) check out the Artisan Pompeii Miche recipe on the Fresh Loaf bread enthusiast community. True Roman bread for true Romans! via Metafilter/Make Related Content: Cook Real Recipes from Ancient Rome: Ostrich Ragoût, Roast Wild Boar, Nut Tarts & More Animation Gives You a Glimpse of What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome Building The Colosseum: The Icon of Rome Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/how-to-bake-ancient-roman-bread-dating-back-to-79-ad.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 put together a list of the world’s greatest Vincent Price fans, you’d have to rank Tim Burton at the top. That goes for "greatest" in the sense of both the fervency of the fan’s enthusiasm for all things Price, and for the fan’s accomplishments in his own right. Burton’s filmmaking craft and his admiration for the midcentury horror-film icon intersected early in his career, when he made the six-minute animated film Vincent for Disney in 1982, three years before his feature debut Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The short’s title refers not to Vincent Price himself, but to its seven-year-old protagonist, Vincent Malloy: "He’s always polite and does what he’s told. For a boy his age, he’s considerate and nice. But he wants to be just like Vincent Price." Those words of narration — as if you couldn’t tell after the first one spoken — come in the voice of Price himself. Vincent Malloy, pale of complexion and untamed of hair, surely resembles Burton’s childhood self, and in more aspects than appearance: the filmmaker grants the character his own idolatry not just of Price but of Edgar Allan Poe, and it’s into their macabre masterworks that his daydreaming sends him — just as they presumably sent the seven-year-old Burton. Burton and Price’s collaboration on Vincent marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted the rest of Price’s life. The appreciative actor called the short "the most gratifying thing that ever happened," and the director would go on to cast him in Edward Scissorhands eight years later. Price died in 1993, the year before the release of Ed Wood, Burton’s dramatized life of Edward D. Wood Jr. In that film, the relationship between semi-retired horror actor Bela Lugosi and the admiring schlock auteur Wood parallels, in a way, that of the more enduringly successful Price and the much more competent Burton. Vincent also drops hints of other things to come in the Burtoniverse: Nightmare Before Christmas fans, for instance, should keep their eyes open for not one but two early appearances of that picture’s bony central player Jack Skellington. This demonstration of the continuity of Burton’s imagination underscores that, as both his biggest fans and biggest critics insist, he’s always lived in a world of his own — probably since Vincent Malloy’s age, when teachers and other authority figures might have described him in exactly the same way. Related Content: 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. Six Early Short Films By Tim Burton Tim Burton’s The World of Stainboy: Watch the Complete Animated Series How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone 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-vincent-tim-burtons-animated-tribute-to-vincent-price-edgar-allan-poe-1982.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’ve ever played Call of Cthulhu, the tabletop role-playing game based on the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, you’ve felt the frustration of having character after painstakingly-created character go insane or simply drop dead upon catching a glimpse of one of the many horrific beings infesting its world. But as the countless readers Lovecraft has posthumously accumulated over nearly eighty years know, that just signals faithfulness to the source material: Lovecraft’s characters tend to run into the same problem, living, as they do, in what French novelist Michel Houellebecq (one of his notable fans, a group that also includes Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges) calls "an open slice of howling fear." Read enough of Lovecraft’s middle-class east-coast professional narrators’ mortal struggles for the words to convey what he called "the boundless and hideous unknown" that suddenly confronts them, and you start to wonder what these creatures actually look like. The clearest word-picture comes in the 1928 story "The Call of Cthulhu," whose narrator describes the titular ancient malevolence—avoiding instantaneous mental breakdown by looking at an idol rather than the being itself—as "a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." And so modern Lovecraftians have enjoyed a new variation of that giant octopus-dragon-man form on "Cthulhu for President" shirts each and every election year. (You can find one for 2016 here.) While that phenomenon would surely have surprised Lovecraft himself, constantly and fruitlessly as he struggled in life, I like to think he’d have approved of the designs, which align in fearsome spirit with the sketches he made. At the top of the post you can see one sketch of the Cthulhu idol, drawn in 1934 on a piece of correspondence with writer R.H. Barlow, Lovecraft’s friend and the eventual executor of his estate. If "The Call of Cthulhu" ranks as Lovecraft’s best-known work, his 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness surely comes in a close second. Just above, we have an illustrated page of the writer’s plot notes for this unforgettable cautionary tale of an Antarctic expedition that happens disastrously upon the mind-bending ruins of a city previously thought only a myth - and the monsters that inhabit it. It exemplifies the defining quality of Lovecraft’s mythology, where, as Slate‘s Rebecca Onion puts it, "ancient beings of profound malevolence lurk just below the surface of the everyday world." "Mountains featured several species of forgotten, intelligent beings, including the ‘Elder Things.’ The sketch on the right side of this page of notes (click here to view it in a larger format), with its annotations (‘body dark grey'; ‘all appendages not in use customarily folded down to body'; ‘leathery or rubbery’) represents Lovecraft working out the specifics of an Elder Thing’s anatomy." That such things lurked in Lovecraft’s imagination have made his state of mind a subject of decades and decades of rich discussion among his enthusiasts. But just the body count racked up by Cthulhu, the Elder Things, and the other denizens of this unfathomable realm should make us thankful that Lovecraft saw them in his mind’s eye so we wouldn’t have to. Note: The second image on this page was featured in the 2013 exhibition held at Brown University, "The Shadow Over College Street: H. P. Lovecraft in Providence." The Brown University Library is the home to the largest collection of H. P. Lovecraft materials in the world. Related Content: H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of "Weird Fiction" H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 "Types of Mistakes" Young Writers Make H.P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories Free Online: Download Audio Books, eBooks & More Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Documentary) 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/h-p-lovecrafts-monster-drawings.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.

For some years now linguist Daniel Everett has challenged the orthodoxy of Noam Chomsky and other linguists who believe in an innate "universal grammar" that governs human language acquisition. A 2007 New Yorker profile described his work with a reclusive Amazonian tribe called the Piraha, among whom Everett found a language "unrelated to any other extant tongue… so confounding to non-natives that" until he arrived in the 70s, "no outsider had succeeded in mastering it." And yet, for all its extraordinary differences, at least one particular feature of Piraha is shared by humans across the globe—"its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations." In places as far flung as the Brazilian rainforest, mountainous Oaxaca, Mexico, the Canary Islands, and the Black Sea coast of Turkey, we find languages that sound more like the speech of birds than of humans. "Whistled languages," writes Michelle Nijhuis in a recent New Yorker post, "have been around for centuries. Herodotus described communities in Ethiopia whose residents ‘spoke like bats,’ and reports of the whistled language that is still used in the Canary Islands date back more than six hundred years." In the short video from UNESCO at the top of the post, you can hear the whistled language of Canary Islanders. (See another short video from Time magazine here.) Called Silbo Gomero, the language "replicates the islanders’ habitual language (Castilian Spanish) with whistling," replacing "each vowel or consonant with a whistling sound." Spoken (so to speak) among a very large community of over 22,000 inhabitants and passed down formally in schools and ceremonies, Silbo Gomero shows no signs of disappearing. Other whistled languages have not fared as well. As you will see in the documentary above, when it comes to the whistled language of northern Oaxacan peoples in a mountainous region of Mexico, "only a few whistlers still practice their ancient tongue." In a previous Open Culture post on this film, Matthias Rascher pointed us toward some scholarly efforts at preservation from the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico, who recorded and transcribed a conversation between two native Oaxacan whistlers. Whistled languages evolved for much the same reason as birdcalls—they enable their "speakers" to communicate across large distances. "Most of the forty-two examples that have been documented in recent times," Nijhuis writes, "arose in places with steep terrain or dense forests—the Atlas Mountains, in northwest Africa; the highlands of northern Laos, the Brazilian Amazon—where it might otherwise be hard to communicate at a distance." Such is the case for the Piraha, the Canary Islanders, the Oaxacan whistlers, and another group of whistlers in a mountainous region of Turkey. As Nijhuis documents in her post, these several thousand speakers have learned to transliterate Turkish into "loud, lilting whistles" that they call "bird language." New Scientist brings us the example of whistled Turkish above (with subtitles), and you can hear more recorded examples at The New Yorker. As with most whistled languages, the Turkish "bird language" makes use of similar structures—though not similar sounds—as human speech, making it a bit like semaphore or Morse code. As such, whistled languages are not likely to offer evidence against the idea of a universal grammar in the architecture of the brain. Yet according to biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün—who conducted a study on the Turkish whistlers published in the latest Current Biology—these languages can show us that "the organization of our brain, in terms of its asymmetrical structure, is not as fixed as we assume." Where we generally process language in the left hemisphere and "pitch, melody, and rhythm" in the right, Nijhuis describes how the whistled Turkish study suggests "that both hemispheres played significant roles" in comprehension. The opportunities to study whistled languages will diminish in the years to come, as cell phones take over their function and more of their speakers lose regional distinctiveness. But the work of Güntürkün and other biological researchers may have fascinating implications for linguists as well, creating further connections between speech and music—and perhaps even between the speech of humans and that of other animals. via The New Yorker Related Content: Speaking in Whistles: The Whistled Language of Oaxaca, Mexico How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation Noam Chomsky Talks About How Kids Acquire Language & Ideas in an Animated Video by Michel Gondry What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/fascinating-whistled-languages-of-the-canary-islands-turkey-mexico.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, we revisited the high school days of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Growing up in New York City during the 1970s, Tyson attended Bronx Science (class of ’76), ran an impressive 4:25 mile, captained the school’s wrestling team, and, he fondly recalls, wore basketball sneakers belonging to the Knick’s Walt "Clyde" Frazier. Tyson was, of course, also a precocious student. Famously, Carl Sagan recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. But Tyson politely declined and went to Harvard for his undergraduate studies. Then, he headed off to Texas, to start his PhD at UT-Austin. That’s where the photo, taken circa 1980, captures him above — hanging out with friends, and looking hipper than your average astrophysics student. This photo (now making the rounds on Reddit) originally appeared in a 2012 article published in the Alcalde, the alumni magazine of The University of Texas. To the magazine’s credit, the article takes an unvarnished look at Tyson’s "failed experiment" in Texas. The piece starts with the lede "Neil deGrasse Tyson, MA ’83, is the public face of science. But he says his success has nothing to do with UT." And, from there, it recounts how professors and university police immediately stereotyped him. The first comment directed to me in the first minute of the first day by a faculty member I had just met was, ‘You must join the department basketball team! or I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building. Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym—and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas. But the real problem wasn’t race. According to Tyson, "there was simply no room for me to be the full person that I was." "An obsessive focus on one thing at a time; a strong connection to pop culture, from the moonwalk to the Rubik’s cube; and a refusal to put research first: these traits contributed to Tyson’s failure at UT," concludes the Alcalde. They also allowed him to flourish later in life. After his "advisors dissolved his dissertation committee—essentially flunking him," Tyson transferred to Columbia, earned his PhD in 1988, and became the greatest popularizer of science since Carl Sagan. We like stories with happy endings. Read more about Tyson’s experience in Texas at the Alcalde. via Boing Boing Related Content: Neil deGrasse Tyson, High School Wrestling Team Captain, Invented a Physics-Based Wrestling Move Carl Sagan Writes a Letter to 17-Year-Old Neil deGrasse Tyson (1975) Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/1980s-photo-captures-neil-degrasse-tyson-looking-hip-in-grad-school.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 1924, Zenon Komisarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet propaganda films ever produced. First, the film is animated using not only traditional cel animation but also collage and stop motion, giving the work a queasy, disorienting feel. A bit like looking at a painting by Henry Darger. Then there is the film’s story. As an intertitle proclaims, this is "a tale about Comrade Coninternov, the Red Army Warrior who flew to Mars, and vanquished all the capitalists on the planet!!" This already sounds better that John Carter. The movie, however, is rather hard to follow without either the appropriate amount of revolutionary fervor or, perhaps, hallucinogens. Interplanetary Revolution opens with a wild-eyed, ax-wielding bulldog with a top hat - a capitalist, obviously. Other capitalists, with swastikas on their foreheads, suck the blood from a hapless member of the proletariat. Then the revolution comes and a pantless capitalist demon loses his mind after devouring a copy of Pravda. Next, the capitalists all board a giant flying shoe and fly off into space. From there, the film gets kind of weird. You can watch the whole thing above. It’s also added to our list of Free Animated Films, a subset of our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made Watch Soviet Animations of Winnie the Pooh, Created by the Innovative Animator Fyodor Khitruk "Glory to the Conquerors of the Universe!": Propaganda Posters from the Soviet Space Race (1958-1963) 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/interplanetary-revolution.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.

Image by David Shankbone Michael Stipe’s tenure as frontman and lyricist for R.E.M. certainly revealed a literate mind. A former art major at the University of Georgia and current art teacher at NYU, his best lyrics scan well as poetry.  One can imagine being invited over for a dinner party to Mr. Stipe’s place, and, glass of wine in hand, absolutely having to nose through his bookshelf. What does the writer of "Nightswimming" read? With the historical references that course through those early albums, would he have socio-political books about America? Would he pull a book off the shelf and say, here, "You have to read this. It will change your life"? Wonder no more, because Stipe was recently asked to write down his Top Ten list of books to take to a desert island. The list was published in The New York Times. Find a skeletal version here: Complete Works - Arthur Rimbaud On the Road - Jack Kerouac Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delaney Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut All Families Are Psychotic - Douglas Coupland Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Play It as It Lays - Joan Didion Four Plays by Aristophanes (translated by William Arrowsmith) Bonjour Tristesse - François Sagan Just Kids - Patti Smith Some of these are classics—for example Kerouac’s On the Road, which Stipe calls "my band’s template"—and the one poet on the list, Rimbaud, is very much an early influence on his writing. Dhalgren was also a favorite of David Bowie’s, who based a lot of Diamond Dogs on the novel. The Copeland and Didion choices stand out, mostly by being less obvious selections from their bibliographies. And as he says that he’s currently reading the Patti Smith book (now being turned into a series on Showtime), we can’t take the selection too seriously. Maybe he just wants to take it to the desert island to finish it. Stipe has included a few sentences on each book to explain his choices. Find them here. Related content: Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag David Bowie’s Top 100 Books Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World 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/michael-stipe-recommends-10-books-for-anyone-marooned-on-a-desert-island.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.

How did everything begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? What is love? We’ve all asked these questions, if only within our heads, and recently a series of BBC animations written by philosopher Nigel Warburton and narrated by a variety of celebrities have done their level best to answer them-or at least to point us in the direction of answering them for ourselves by not just telling but wittily showing us what great minds have thought and said on the issues before we came along. Most recently, they’ve taken on that eternal conundrum, "How can I know anything at all?" The already philosophically inclined will have recognized this as the foundational question of epistemology, that formidable branch of philosophy concerned with what we know, how we know, and whether we can know in the first place. Many familiar names in the history of philosophy have stepped onto this field, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whose thoughts this series of extremely brief explanatory videos begins. It lays out his analogy of the beetle in a box, wherein each person holds a box containing what they call a "beetle," but nobody can look inside another’s box to confirm whether their idea of a beetle aligns with anyone else’s. In Wittgenstein’s view, says actor Aidan Turner, "there can’t be more to the public meaning of a language than we’re capable of teaching each other, and the private ‘something’—the ‘beetle’—can’t have a role in that teaching, because we can’t get at it." The next video, in asking whether we should believe in miracles, brings in Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume, who thought that "if we follow the rule of proportioning our beliefs to the available evidence, there will always be more evidence that the eyewitness accounts were mistaken than not." Hume’s predecessor George Berkeley makes an appearance to weigh in on whether anything exists—or, more precisely, whether anything exists besides our minds, which convince us that we experience real things out there in the world. Finally, the series lands on a method we can use to know, one science has relied on, with seeming success, for quite some time now: Karl Popper’s idea of falsification. "Rather than looking for supporting evidence, Popper argued that scientists go out of their way to refute their own hypotheses, testing them to destruction," leaving those that remain, at least provisionally, as knowledge. Though none of these videos exceed two minutes in length, each one, dense with both philosophical and pop-cultural references, will leave you with more knowledge about epistemology than you went in with—assuming they don’t leave you disbelieving in knowledge itself. Related Content: 140 Free Online Philosophy Courses What is Love? BBC Philosophy Animations Feature Sartre, Freud, Aristophanes, Dawkins & More 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 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/how-can-i-know-anything-at-all-bbc-animations-feature-the-philosophy-of-wittgenstein-hume-popper-more.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. %%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.

Neil Gaiman might just be the most beloved fantasy author out there. He writes weird, twisted, exhilarating tales about hidden realities and the bizarre, fanciful creatures that live in them. His works, like Sandman, Fragile Things and American Gods, are pure escapism and a blast to read. No doubt, that’s the major reason why the author has developed such a rabid fan base. But perhaps another reason is that he is simply more available than most writers. Sure, other authors, like J. K. Rowling for instance, might have inspired an entire generation with her Harry Potter series but she prefers to keep a certain remove from her readership. Though she has a Twitter account, she uses it sparingly. Gaiman, on the other hand, is seemingly always on Twitter - he has, as of this writing, tweeted at least nine times in the past 24 hours, interacting with fans, publishers and the press. This is the guy who once reportedly signed 75,000 copies of his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, after all. He has also posted a lot of his work for free up on the internet. Below is a list of Gaiman’s work that you can read, see or hear online. Many are read by Neil himself. If you know of any missing texts, please let us know and we’ll get them added to our list ASAP. Above you can find videos of Gaiman reading the first chapter of his book Coraline, and also the story "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury." Audio & Video Click-Clack the Rattle Bag - Free Video Coraline - Free Video "Harlequin Valentine" - Free Audio at Last.FM "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" - Free MP3 "Orange" (read live) - Free Video "Other People" (read live) - Free Video "The Day the Saucers Came" - Free Video "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" - Free Audio The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Free Audio The Graveyard Book (a novel read live with illustrations) - Free Video "A Study in Emerald" - Free iTunes Text "A Study in Emerald" - Read Online "Bitter Grounds" - Read Online "Cinnamon" - Read Online ‘Click-clack the Rattlebag’ - Read Online "Down to a Sunless Sea" - Read Online "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" - Read Online "I Cthulhu" - Read Online "The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds" - Read Online "The Day the Saucers Came" - Read Online The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Read Online Related Content: 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free Neil Gaiman Reads "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains Amanda Palmer Animates & Narrates Husband Neil Gaiman’s Unconscious Musings 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/2015/08/17-stories-novels-by-neil-gaiman-online-free-texts-readings-by-neil-himself.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.

Recently an older musician acquaintance told me he never "got into ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and all that," referring to the "first major space jam" of Pink Floyd’s career and the subsequent explosion of space rock bands. I found myself a little taken aback. Though I was born too late to be there, I’ve come to see "’Interstellar Overdrive’ and all that" as one of the most interesting things about the end of the sixties—the coming of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, of The Soft Machine, of Hawkwind and other psychedelic warriors. Too oft overlooked in the popular Woodstock/Altamont binary shorthand for fin-de-sixties rock and roll, these bands’ brand of prog/jazz/blues/psych-rock experimentalism got its due in Amougies, Belgium, in a 1969 festival meant as Europe’s answer to the three-day "Aquarian exposition" staged in upstate New York that same year. Sponsored by Paris magazine Actuel, "The Actuel Rock Festival" featured all of the bands mentioned above (except Hawkwind), along with Yes, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, and many more. MC’ing the event, and serving as Beefheart’s manager, was none other than impresario of weird himself, Frank Zappa, who sat in with Floyd on "Interstellar Overdrive," bringing his considerable lead guitar prowess to their dark, descending instrumental. Just above, hear that Zappa/Floyd performance of the song. The live audio recording is fuzzy and a bit hollow, but the playing comes through perfectly clear. Zappa, in fact, jammed with nearly all the artists on the roster, though only a few recordings have surfaced, like this one from an audience member. Of their collaboration, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason said in 1973, "Frank Zappa is really one of those rare musicians that can play with us. The little he did in Amougies was terribly correct." I think you’ll agree. Dangerous Minds records many of Zappa’s recollections of the event, including a characteristically sardonic account he gave in an interview with The Simpsons’ Matt Groening in which he complains of feeling "like Linda McCartney" and about the scourge of "slumbering euro-hippies." Zappa apparently did not remember jamming with Floyd but "the photos don’t lie and neither does the recording." He does recall playing with Captain Beefheart, who says he himself "enjoyed it." You can hear Beefheart’s set with Zappa above. According to a biography of founding Pink Floyd singer and guitarist Syd Barrett—gone by the time of the festival—footage of the Zappa/Floyd jam exists, part of an unreleased documentary of the event by Gerome Laperrousaz. That film has yet to surface, it seems, but we do have the film above—slipping between black-and-white and color—of Pink Floyd playing "Green is the Colour," "Careful With That Axe, Eugene," and "Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun." It’s a must watch if only for Roger Waters’ bone-chilling screams in the second song. The festival is notable not only for these early performances of the newly Gilmour-fronted Pink Floyd, but also for the appearance of Aynsley Dunbar, future Zappa drummer and journeyman musician extraordinaire. Allegedly Zappa met Dunbar at the festival and was quite impressed with the latter’s jazz chops (though Dunbar first joined Zappa’s band on guitar before moving to drums). You can hear Zappa jam with his eventual star drummer’s band, Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation, above. Related Content: Watch Frank Zappa Play Michael Nesmith on The Monkees (1967) Frank Zappa Reads NSFW Passage From William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1978) Psychedelic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Early Days with Syd Barrett, 1967 Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Traffic & Other Bands Play Huge London Festival "Christmas on Earth Continued" (1967) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.   http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-night-frank-zappa-jammed-with-pink-floyd-and-captain-beefheart-too-belgium-1969.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.

Just yesterday we were musing on perusing rock stars’ bookshelves, and today we learn it has become a reality, if you live in London. Polymath and all-around swell person David Byrne opened the 22nd annual Meltdown Festival this last Monday, and in the spirit of London’s Poetry Library (which is hosting this part of the event), the former Talking Heads frontman has shipped over 250 books to stock his own lending library for the duration of the festival, until August 30. In his Guardian essay explaining his decision to let you rifle through his collection of music books—some of which were used as research for his own How Music Works—Byrne waxes about the library he loved in his teenage years in suburban Baltimore: We were desperate to know what was going on in the cool places, and, given some suggestions and direction, the library was one place where that wider exciting world became available. In my little town, the library also had vinyl that one could check out and I discovered avant-garde composers such as Xenakis and Messiaen, folk music from various parts of the world and even some pop records that weren’t getting much radio play in Baltimore. It was truly a formative place. A full list of the books has yet to surface, but a few people are tweeting photos of titles, like Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa or Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Squinting our eyes at the promotional photo of Byrne sitting in front of the shelves, we can spot Lester Bangs’ Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung, Eric Weisbard’s Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, Paula Court’s photobook New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88; and Thurston Moore’s Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. (Recognize some other titles? Please add them in the comments.) Byrne has set up a free-to-borrow system with a credit card on file just in case you abscond with the book, although he does admit it may happen and "so be it." There’s also an added thrill: Some of my books may have highlighted bits or notes scrawled in the margins. I hope nothing embarrassing. Byrne’s programming for the Meltdown Festival can be seen here. Highlights include an a cappella workshop by Petra Haden, a showing of There Will Be Blood with live score by Jonny Greenwood and the London Contemporary Orchestra, the reappearance of Young Marble Giants, Young Jean Lee’s band Future Wife performing We’re Gonna Die with David Byrne as special guest; and many other selections of "Things David Thinks You Should Hear." In the meantime, here’s a photo from the fest’s opening of Mr. Byrne riding a portable espresso shop on wheels. Related Content: Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag David Bowie’s Top 100 Books David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve 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/david-byrnes-personal-lending-library-is-now-open.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.