Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Streaming Service

in Film | October 31st, 2022

For many Open Culture readers, the Halloween season offers an opportunity — not to say an excuse — to re-experience classic horror films: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunted Castle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we suggest a home screening of the formidable work of vintage cinema that is 1968’s The Astro Zombies? Written, produced, and directed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Devils — it features not just “a mad astro-scientist” played by John Carradine and “two gore-crazed, solar-powered killer robot zombies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door victims; Chinese communist spies; deadly Mexican secret agents led by the insanely voluptuous Tura Satana” and an “intrepid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zombies for free, and newly remastered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new streaming site from film and video distributor Kino Lorber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treated to a wealth of titillating viewing options of a variety of eras and subgenres: “Drive-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “golden age exploitation” like Reefer Madness and She Shoulda Said ‘No’!; and even classics like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthusiasts, of course, may well go straight to the available selections, thoughtfully grouped together, from “Master of Italian Horror” Mario Bava and prolific Spanish “B-movie” kingpin Jesús Franco. Those looking to throw a fright night might consider Kino Cult’s offerings filed under “hardboiled horror”: Killbillies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bunny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pictures skimp on the grotesque; fewer still skimp on the humor, a necessary ingredient in even the most harrowing horror movies. Far from a pile of cynical hackwork, Kino Cult’s library has clearly been curated with an eye toward films that, although for the most part produced inexpensively and with unrelenting intent to provoke visceral reactions in their audiences, are hardly without interest to serious cinephiles. The site even includes an “artsploitation” section containing such taboo-breaching works as Curtis Burz’s Summer House. Among its general recent additions you’ll also find Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps the most daring high-profile provocateur currently at work in the medium. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more available to stream at no charge, none of us, no matter our particular cinematic sensibilities, has an excuse to pass this Halloween un-entertained — and more to the point, undisturbed. Enter the collection here.

An Introduction to the Painting of Artemisia Gentileschi, the First Woman Admitted to Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno (1593-1653)

in Art, Gender | October 28th, 2022

The works will speak for themselves. – Artemisia Gentileschi

The praise Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi garnered during her lifetime is astonishing.

Not because the work isn’t deserving of the attention, but rather, because she was a young woman in 17th-century Florence.

The first female to be accepted into Florence’s prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, she was collected by the Medicis and respected by her peers – almost all of them male.

Her style was as dramatic as the subjects she depicted.

One of her most compelling ones, covered in Allison Leigh’s animated TED-Ed lesson, above, comes from an apocryphal book of the Old Testament. It concerns Judith, a comely Jewish widow who, assisted by her maidservant, beheaded the loutish Assyrian general Holofernes, whose forces threatened her town.

This story has attracted many artists over time: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Cristofano Allori, Goya, Klimt, Franz von Stuck, and Caravaggio, the painter whom Artemisia most sought to emulate as a teen.

Artemisia visited Judith and Holofernes several times throughout her career.

Her first attempt, at around the age of 19 or 20, features two healthy-looking young women, their sleeves sensibly rolled so as not to dirty their bright dresses, a prospect that seems much more likely than it does in Caravaggio’s version, painted some 15 years early.

Caravaggio’s Judith is brave, but maidenly, a bit reticent in her snowy frock.

Artemisia’s is a bad ass, sword casually balanced on her shoulder as she checks that the coast is clear before escaping with a basket containing her victim’s head. Although she prayed for the success of her endeavor, this is a woman who might not have needed god’s help to “crush the enemies” arrayed against her people.

Things get even more visceral in Artemisia’s third depiction, painted perhaps 10 years later, after she had married and moved to Florence.

Art historian Sister Wendy Beckett, an unabashed fan, describes the muscular and bloody scene in Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces:

Gentileschi shows Judith gripping the head and wielding the sword with a ferocity of concentration as she applies herself to the grisly but necessary task, like a practical housewife gutting a fish (there is none of that one stroke and it’s off, beloved of the male painter. The maid might feel qualms, not Judith… The horrified face of the butchered male is balanced by the grimly composed face of the butchering female.

Several years further on, Artemisia again imagined Judith’s flight, in a scene so theatrical, it could be a production still.

It’s easy to imagine that Artemisia’s talent was carefully cultivated by her artist father, Orazio Gentileschi, but when it comes to the ferocity of her depictions, the speculation tends to take on a darker cast.

The TED-Ed lesson brings up her rape as a teenager, at the hands of her father’s friend, fellow painter Agostono Tassi. Leigh also provides legal and societal context, something that is often missing from more sensational allusions to this traumatic event.

If you engage with the TED-Ed’s lesson plan more deeply, you’ll find a link to an article on novelist Joy McCullough’s research into 400-year-old court transcripts prior to describing Artemisia’s rape trial in 2019 Blood Water Paint, as well as historian Elizabeth S. Cohen‘s essay The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: a Rape as History:

Combining irresistibly sex, violence, and genius, like the story of Heloise and Abelard, the rape of Artemisia Gentileschi has been retold many times. So often indeed, and with such relish that this episode overshadows much discussion of the painter and has come to distort our vision of her. In the past as well as in the recent renewal of interest in Artemisia, biographers and critics have had trouble seeing beyond the rape. In her case, the old-fashioned notion that women are defined essentially by their sexual histories continues to reign, as if a girl who suffers assault must be understood as thereafter a primarily sexual creature.

Explore a gallery of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings here.

As long as I live I will have control over my being. – Artemisia Gentileschi

The Female Pioneers of the Bauhaus Art Movement: Discover Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers & Other Forgotten Innovators

The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, “Fountain,” Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

The Complete Works of Hilma af Klint Are Getting Published for the First Time in a Beautiful, Seven-Volume Collection

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear 149 Vintage Halloween Radio Shows from the Golden Age of Radio

in Radio | October 28th, 2022

As Halloween radio broadcasts go, it would be hard to displace in American cultural memory the adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that aired in 1938. Not every Halloween special can be directed by a young Orson Welles, of course, but that’s hardly a reason to ignore the countless other Halloween broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio. This year you can tune them in with the Youtube playlist above, which collects 149 such spookiest-time-of-the-season episodes from such beloved shows as Lum and Abner, The Aldrich Family, Fibber McGee and Molly, Our Miss Brooks, The Great Gildersleeve, The Jack Benny Program, The Shadow, and more.

Whether comedy, drama, or another genre besides, old-time radio programs tended to seize upon the theme of every holiday that came down the pike, and Halloween — with its costume parties, ever-present threat of pranks, and door-to-door demands — offered their writers and performers a once-in-a-year opportunity for unwonted degrees of mischief.

For normally lighthearted shows, it was also a chance to go at least a little bit dark; for a show like Suspense, whose long and often chilling run began with an Alfred Hitchcock production, most weeks were Halloween right up until the end of radio’s Golden Age. (This playlist features a broadcast from August of 1961 that still entertains in October of 2022.)

If you’d just like a soundtrack straight from the classic American airwaves for next Monday night (or a weekend party beforehand), have a listen to the newly uploaded vintage Halloween playlist just above. Its fifteen tracks include seasonally suitable songs from Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaughan (not to mention its opener, a not-exactly-“Monster Mash” number from Bobby Pickett), with vintage advertisements and other broadcast ephemera in between. It was as true in radio’s heyday of the late nineteen-twenties through the early sixties as it is now: Halloween is the time to let blur the boundaries between light and dark, myth and reality, the ordinary and the grotesque — and to make more than a few corny gags while you’re at it.

Happy Halloween! Louis Armstrong Performs Skeleton in the Closet (1936)

Hear 14 Hours of Weird H.P. Lovecraft Stories on Halloween: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror” & More

Hear 90+ Episodes of Suspense, the Iconic Golden Age Radio Show Launched by Alfred Hitchcock

What Scares Us, and How Does this Manifest in Film? A Halloween Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#66)

Hear Orson Welles’ Iconic War of the Worlds Broadcast (1938)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, a Documentary Streaming Free Online

in Art, Film | October 28th, 2022

As previously mentioned here on OC, the film distributor Kino Lorber has been quietly making complete art films available to stream on YouTube and its own website. In recent weeks, they’ve uploaded to YouTube the documentaries, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint and M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. Now comes Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, which they describe as follows:

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist’s intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch himself, and which to his pupils or followers. The experts shuttle between Den Bosch, Madrid and Venice, cutting their way through the art world’s tangle of red tape, in a battle against the obstacle of countless egos and conflicting interests. Not every museum is prepared to allow access to their precious art works.

You can find Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil listed in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our larger collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

To watch more free-to-stream Kino Lorber films, click here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks for your support!

Hieronymus Bosch Figurines: Collect Surreal Characters from Bosch’s Paintings & Put Them on Your Bookshelf

Take a Virtual Tour of Hieronymus Bosch’s Bewildering Masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

200 Bassists Play the Famous Bass Line of Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”

in Music | October 27th, 2022

Ding, ding, ding, de de, ding, ding–the bassline for Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” is simple and unforgettable. In Sao Paulo, British bassist Charles Berthoud paid tribute to John Deacon’s riff, performing it with 200 other bassists. Berthoud plays a beautiful lead; the others keep the rhythm going. Evidently, the event was sponsored by Rockin’ 1000, a collective that stages gigs where hundreds of musicians perform rock classics together. You can find more of their videos in the Relateds below.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks for your support!

via Laughing Squid

1,000 Musicians Perform “My Hero” in a Moving Tribute to Foo Fighters’ Drummer Taylor Hawkins

David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” Performed Live by The Biggest Rock Band on Earth (1,000 Musicians in Total)

Watch 1,000 Musicians Play the Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

See Metropolis‘ Scandalous Dance Scene Colorized, Enhanced, and Newly Soundtracked

in Film | October 27th, 2022

It didn’t take long after the invention of cinema for its sheer power of spectacle to become clear. Arguably, it was apparent even in the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers, though they attempted only to capture images familiar from everyday life at the time. But in a decade or two emerged auteurs like Fritz Lang, who, having grown up with cinema itself, possessed highly developed instincts for how to use it to captivate large and various audiences. Released in 1927, Lang’s Metropolis showed moviegoers an elaborate vision, both fearsome and alluring, of the industrial dystopia that could lay ahead. But it also had dancing girls!

Or rather, it had a dancing girl who’s actually a robot — a Maschinenmensch, according to the script — built by the film’s villain in an attempt to besmirch the heroine who would liberate the titular city’s downtrodden workers. (Both the real woman and her mechanical impersonator are skillfully played by Brigitte Helm.)

In the video above, you can see the scandalous and cinematically innovative spectacle-within-a-spectacle that is Metropolis‘ dance scene colorized, upscaled to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, and newly soundtracked with a track called “Lemme See About It” by Max McFerren. This is recognizably Metropolis, but it’s also a Metropolis none of us has ever seen before.

The production also combines visual material from different versions of the film, quite a few of which have been edited and re-edited, lost and recovered over nearly the past century. (The running times of the officially released cuts alone range from 83 to 153 minutes.) Certain differences in quality between one shot and the next make this obvious, though the consistency of the overall colorization eases the sudden transitions between them. A Metropolis fan couldn’t help but feel some curiosity about how the whole picture would play with all of these enhancements, not that it would resemble anything Lang could originally have envisioned. But then, no single cut exists that definitively reflects his intentions — and besides, he’d surely approve of how the film’s dance sequence has been made to captivate us once again.

Watch Metropolis’ Cinematically Innovative Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intended It to Be Seen (1927)

If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack

One of the Greatest Dances Sequences Ever Captured on Film Gets Restored in Color by AI: Watch the Classic Scene from Stormy Weather

The Iconic Dance Scene from Hellzapoppin’ Presented in Living Color with Artificial Intelligence (1941)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

in History | October 26th, 2022

The adjective medieval tends to conjure up vivid and sometimes off-putting images, not least when applied to sex. But how many of us have any sense at all of what the real people of the Middle Ages got up to in bed? To get one, we could do worse than asking historian Eleanor Janega, teacher of the course Medieval Gender and Sexuality and host of the History Hit video above, “What Was Sex Really Like For Medieval People?” In it, Janega has first to make clear that, yes, medieval Europeans had sex; if they hadn’t, of course, many of us wouldn’t be here today. But we’d be forgiven for assuming that the seemingly absolute dominance of the Church quashed any and all of their erotic opportunities.

According to the medieval Church, Janega says, “the only time sex is acceptable is between two married people for procreative purposes.” Its many other restrictions included “no sex on Saturdays and Sundays in case you’re too turned on during mass; only have sex in the missionary position, because anything else subverts the natural relationship between men and women; don’t get fully naked during sex, because it’s just too exciting; in short, during sex, you should be trying to have the least amount of fun possible.” Strict and unambiguous though these rules were, “nobody really listened to them” — and what’s more, given the lack of private spaces, “sex was almost a public affair in the Middle Ages.”

So says Kate Lister, who researches the history of sexuality, and who turns up to bring her own knowledge of the subject to the party. “We tend to think about medieval people as being real prudes,” says Janega, but even scant historical records — and rather more copious erotic manuscript marginalia — show that “they were interested in all kinds of sex and romance that we would find completely unacceptable.” Lister adds that, “in many ways, we’re not open like the medieval people were. We don’t have public communal bathing. We don’t have sex in the same room as other people. We don’t go to a high-brow dinner party and tell pubic-hair jokes.” Or we don’t, at least, if we haven’t devoted our careers to the sexuality of the Middle Ages, a field of history clearly unfit for prudes.

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

What Did People Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cookbook Explain

Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Many Others

in Audio Books, Literature | October 26th, 2022

“Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”

That’s how Plymouth University introduces Herman Melville’s classic tale from 1851. And it’s what set the stage for their web project launched back in 2012. Called The Moby-Dick Big Read, the project featured celebrities and lesser known figures reading all 135 chapters from Moby-Dick — chapters that you can start downloading (as free audio files) on iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.

The project started with the first chapters being read by Tilda Swinton (Chapter 1), Captain R.N. Hone (Chapter 2), Nigel Williams (Chapter 3), Caleb Crain (Chapter 4), Musa Okwonga (Chapter 5), and Mary Norris (Chapter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow, Mary Oliver and even Prime Minister David Cameron read later ones.

If you want to read the novel as you go along, find the text over at Project Gutenberg.

Tilda Swinton’s narration of Chapter 1 appears right below:

An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks for your support!

How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Hear a Complete 24-Hour Reading of Moby-Dick, Recorded at the Southbank Centre in London (2015)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

in History, Language, Writing | October 25th, 2022

Literacy in Chinese may now be widely attained, but it isn’t easily attained. Just a century ago it wasn’t widely attained either, at least not by half of the Chinese speakers alive. As a rule, women once weren’t taught the thousands of logographic characters necessary to read and write in the language. But in one particular section of the land, Jiangyong County in Hunan province, some did master the 600 to 700 characters of a phonetic script made to reflect the local dialect and now called Nüshu (女书), or “women’s writing.”

In its heyday, Nüshu’s users had a variety of names for it, “including ‘mosquito writing,’ because it is a little slanted and with long ‘legs,'” writes Ilaria Maria Sala in a Quartz piece on the script’s history. Its greatest concentration of practitioners lived in “the village of Shangjiangxu, where young girls exchanged small tokens of friendly affection, such as fans decorated with calligraphy or handkerchiefs embroidered with a few auspicious words.”

Other, more formal occasions for the use of Nüshu, included when girls decided to “make a full-fledged pact of closeness with one another that they were ‘best friends’ — jiebai zimei or ‘sworn sisters’ — a relationship that was recognized as valuable and even necessary for them in the local social system. Such a once-obscure chapter of Chinese history has proven irresistible to readers from a variety of cultures in recent decades.

“Most interpretations and headlines have been about a ‘secret language’ that women used, preferably to communicate their pain,” writes Sala, which struck her as evidence of people taking the story of Nüshu and “reading into it what they wanted, regardless of what it meant.” Yet such an interpretation has surely done its part to spread interest in the near-extinct’s script’s revival, described by BBC.com’s Andrew Lofthouse as originating in “the tiny village of Puwei, which is surrounded by the Xiao river and only accessible via a small suspension bridge.” After three Nüshu writers were discovered there in the eighties, “it became the focal point for Nüshu research. In 2006, the script was listed as a National Intangible Cultural Heritage by the State Council of China, and a year later, a museum was built on Puwei Island.”

There training is provided to the few select “interpreters or ‘inheritors’ of the language, learning to read, write, sing and embroider Nüshu.” Ironically, Lofthouse adds, “much of what we know about Nüshu is due to the work of male researcher Zhou Shuoyi” who happened to hear of it in the nineteen-fifties and was later persecuted during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution — a treatment that included 21 years in a labor camp — for having researched such an artifact of the feudal past. Once a useful tool for expressing emotions and performing social rituals socialization, Nüshu had become politically dangerous. What it becomes now, half a century later and with its renewal only just beginning, is up to its new learners.

Related content:

Free Chinese Lessons

The Improbable Invention of Chinese Typewriters & Computer Keyboards: Three Videos Tell the Techno-Cultural Story

The World’s Oldest Multicolor Book, a 1633 Chinese Calligraphy & Painting Manual, Now Digitized and Put Online

How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Animated Map

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

There Are Eight Forms of Intelligence, Not Just One: Which Apply to You?

in Psychology | October 25th, 2022

Intelligence is a fraught subject of discussion, and only becoming more so. Among the frameworks developed safely to approach it, one has gained special prominence: the theory championed by developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, author of the book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. And how many such intelligences are there? In the Big Think video above — posted in 2016, 33 years after Frames of Mind — he names ten: language, logic and mathematics, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, teaching, and existential.

Some of these may strike you as only tangentially related to intelligence, traditionally defined. Gardner has considered this: “People say, ‘Well, music’s a talent, it’s not an intelligence.’ And I say, ‘Well, why, if you’re good with words, is that an intelligence, but if you’re good with tones and rhythms and timbres…”

Nobody, in his telling, has ever come up with a convincing response. Hence his mission to expand the definition of intelligence beyond the aggregate measure of brainpower long known as the general intelligence factor — or more commonly, “g factor” — to encompass the sort of skills whose usefulness we can see in the real world, away from the constructed rigors of psychometric tests.

“Whether there’s eight intelligences or ten or twelve is less important to me than having broken the monopoly of a single intelligence, which sort of labels you for all time,” says Gardner. You can see eight of his intelligences broken down in more detail — and perhaps even identify your own strongest suit — in the Practical Psychology video just above. Gardner also expresses optimism about our ability to develop different intelligences: you can choose to concentrate on a specific one, but “if you want to be a jack of all trades and be very well-rounded, then you’re probably going to want to nurture the intelligences which aren’t that strong.” Whatever your own view on multiple intelligences, don’t forget how the old saying originally went in full: “Jack of all trades, master of none, though often better than a master of one.”

How Reading Increases Your Emotional Intelligence & Brain Function: The Findings of Recent Scientific Studies

Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower: Creativity & the “Incubation Period”

You Don’t “Find” Your Passion in Life, You Actively Develop It, Explains Psychologist Carol Dweck, Theorist of the “Growth Mindset”

Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Breaking Bad-O-Verse — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #135 Considers “Better Call Saul”

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | October 25th, 2022

Given the end of Better Call Saul, your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer, plus NY Times entertainment writer/philosophy professor Lawrence Ware, novelist/writing professor Sarahlyn Bruck, and philosopher/musician Al Baker discuss this strange TV “franchise” that amazingly produced a prequel that was arguably better than the original. We cover the characterization and pacing, novelistic TV vs. not having a plot roadmap in advance, and whether we want to see another installment in this world.

A few articles we consulted included:

“Breaking Bad vs Better Call Saul: Which Series Is Better?” by Frazier Tharpe
“What’s next for the ‘Breaking Bad’ universe?” By Adam Starkey
“Giancarlo Esposito Wants A Gus Fring Breaking Bad Prequel” by Eddie Makuch
“Current TV Shows That Are Just Breaking Bad Ripoffs” from Ranker

Follow us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pretty Much Pop. Support the show and hear bonus talking for this and nearly every other episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Free Cult Films by Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Streaming Service

An Introduction to the Painting of Artemisia Gentileschi, the First Woman Admitted to Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno (1593-1653)

Hear 149 Vintage Halloween Radio Shows from the Golden Age of Radio

Watch Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, a Documentary Streaming Free Online

200 Bassists Play the Famous Bass Line of Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”

See Metropolis‘ Scandalous Dance Scene Colorized, Enhanced, and Newly Soundtracked

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Many Others

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

There Are Eight Forms of Intelligence, Not Just One: Which Apply to You?

The Breaking Bad-O-Verse — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #135 Considers “Better Call Saul”

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