When the filmmaker died this past January, he left behind no shortage of coffee paraphernalia—ranging from a high-end La Marzocco espresso machine to some run-of-the-mill devices. Take, for example, a fairly ordinary “Mr. Coffee” coffee maker that sold at auction for $4,550. Or a 1970s electric espresso maker made of metal and orange plastic. Above, the coffee connoisseur James Hoffmann takes the orange machine for a test drive. (He paid nearly $2,000 for it, after all.) As for the verdict — no spoilers here. You’ll have to see for yourself.
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At a 1998 conference on technology and life, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams once proposed the notion of a sentient puddle. Imagine it “waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ ” No matter how much intelligence it may somehow have attained, this puddle doesn’t realize that its shape was dictated by its environment, not the other way around. Nor does it seem to realize on just how many factors its very existence is contingent; to its mind, this is a puddle’s world, and the rest of us are just living in it.
Of course, the rest of us are in just the same situation. In the 70-minute Big Think video above, evolutionary developmental biologist Sean B. Carroll puts our presence on Earth in perspective, beginning with the various factors that happened to converge to make complex life possible on this planet at all. “A huge number of things had to go right for our species to exist, and for each of us individually to exist,” he says, and that’s true on “the cosmological scale, the geological scale, and the biological scale.”
One important event is the asteroid impact that “reset” life on Earth 66 million years ago, which triggered a gradual cooling of the planet, and another was the tectonic movement that pushed together what we now know as Asia and the Indian subcontinent. A result of these and other unlikely occurrences was the “biosphere” in which we and all other extant species live today.
What about you and me in particular? Neither of us, as Carroll tells it here and in his book A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, should feel that our place was guaranteed. In human reproduction, when two parents get together and “that one lucky sperm makes it and combines with that one egg at that moment, that’s about a one-in-70-trillion event, genetically speaking.” This can be difficult to internalize, since our own existence is all we’ve ever known, in the manner of Adams’ sentient puddle. Even “as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller,” it continues “frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it.” There’s a lesson for humanity in that story, and one that hasn’t become any less urgent in the past 27 years.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The expression “YOLO” may now be just passé enough to require explanation. It stands, as only some of us would try to deny remembering, for “You only live once,” a sentiment that reflects an eternal truth. Some bodies of religious belief don’t strictly agree with it, of course, but that was also true 24 centuries ago, when an unknown artist created the so-called “YOLO mosaic” that was unearthed in Southern Turkey in the twenty-tens. That artifact, whose depiction of a wine-drinking skeleton living it up even in death has delighted thousands upon thousands of viewers on the internet, is at the center of the new Hochelaga video above.
To the side of that merry set of bones is the Greek text “ΕΥΦΡΟΣΥΝΟΣ,” often translated as “Be cheerful and live your life.” As Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny points out, that’s a somewhat loose interpretation, since the word “roughly means ‘joyful-minded,’ or simply ‘cheerful.’ ” A more important element not often taken into consideration is the mosaic’s context.
It was discovered during the excavation of a third-century BC Greco-Roman villa, where it constituted one end of a dining-room triptych. In the middle was a scene, a trope in comedies of the time, of a toga-clad young “gatecrasher” running in hopes of a free dinner. On the other end is a mostly destroyed image of a type of figure known as “the African fisherman.”
Taken together, this domestic artwork could reflect the Epicurean teaching that “life should be about pursuing happiness and enjoying the simple pleasures while you still can.” But if the “cheerful skeleton,” as Trelawny calls it, draws attention from the rest of the triptych, that speaks to its symbolic power across the ages. Common not only in ancient Rome, the symbolic figure also makes vivid appearances in medieval art (especially during the time of the Black Death), Renaissance portraiture, the Día de Muertos-ready drawings of José Guadalupe Posada, and even Disney cartoons like The Skeleton Dance. As long as death remains undefeated, each era needs its own memento mori, and the cheerful skeleton, in all its paradoxical appeal, will no doubt keep turning up to the job — sometimes with a drink in hand.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human carelessness, earthquakes and the grim efficiency of the United States Air Force. The first films of hugely important figures like Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Shimizu have simply vanished. So we should consider ourselves fortunate that Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Kuretta Ippei — a 1926 film known in the States as A Page of Madness – has somehow managed to survive the vagaries of fate. Kinugasa sought to make a European-style experimental movie in Japan and, in the process, he made one of the great landmarks of silent cinema. You can watch it above.
Born in 1896, Kinugasa started his adult life working as an onnagata, an actor who specializes in playing female roles. In 1926, after working for a few years behind the camera under pioneering director Shozo Makino, Kinugasa bought a film camera and set up a lab in his house in order to create his own independently financed movies. He then approached members of the Shinkankaku (new impressionists) literary group to help him come up with a story. Author Yasunari Kawabata wrote a treatment that would eventually become the basis for A Page of Madness.
Though the synopsis of the plot doesn’t really do justice to the movie — a retired sailor who works at an insane asylum to care for his wife who tried to kill their child — the visual audacity of Page is still startling today. The opening sequence rhythmically cuts between shots of a torrential downpour and gushing water before dissolving into a hallucinatorily odd scene of a young woman in a rhomboid headdress dancing in front of a massive spinning ball. The woman is, of course, an inmate at the asylum dressed in rags. As her dance becomes more and more frenzied, the film cuts faster and faster, using superimpositions, spinning cameras and just about every other trick in the book.
While Kinugasa was clearly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which also visualizes the inner world of the insane, the movie is also reminiscent of the works of French avant-garde filmmakers like Abel Gance, Russian montage masters like Sergei Eisenstein and, in particular, the subjective camerawork of F. W. Murnau in Der Letzte Mann. Kinugasa incorporated all of these influences seamlessly, creating an exhilarating, disturbing and ultimately sad tour de force of filmmaking. The great Japanese film critic Akira Iwasaki called the movie “the first film-like film born in Japan.”
When A Page of Madness was released, it played at a theater in Tokyo that specialized in foreign movies. Page was indeed pretty foreign compared to most other Japanese films at the time. The movie was regarded, film scholar Aaron Gerow notes, as “one of the few Japanese works to be treated as the ‘equal’ of foreign motion pictures in a culture that still looked down on domestic productions.” Yet it didn’t change the course of Japanese cinema, and it was thought of as a curiosity at a time when most films in Japan were kabuki adaptations and samurai stories.
Page disappeared not long after its release and, for over 50 years, was thought lost until Kinugasa found it in his own storehouse in 1971. During that time Kinugasa received a Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his splashy samurai spectacle The Gate of Hell(1953) and Kawabata, who wrote the treatment, got a Nobel Prize in Literature for writing books like Snow Country about a lovelorn geisha.
This Is Spinal Tap came out more than 40 years ago. At the time, says director Rob Reiner in a recent interview at San Diego Comic-Con, “nobody got it. I mean, they thought I’d made a movie about a real band that wasn’t very good, and why wouldn’t I make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” Indeed, stories circulated of people in the music industry (including the late Ozzy Osbourne) not realizing it was supposed to be a comedy, so close was its satire to their actual professional lives. Eventually, “the real word started creeping in”: the fictional band “played Glastonbury, they played Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium.” Real-life rock and pop musicians also became fans of the film. “Every time I see it,” Reiner quotes Sting as saying, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
The boundaries between Spinal Tap’s world and the real one have remained porous enough that the production of the film’s upcoming sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues has involved a great many celebrities playing themselves, or at least versions thereof.
Take, for example, the newly released version of “Stonehenge,” whose music video features not just Elton John, but — to the delight of some fans, and perhaps the disappointment of others — a correctly scaled stage prop. The song will be included on the album of The End Continues, scheduled for release along with the film on September 12th, whose thirteen tracks bring in guest stars like Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks, and Trisha Yearwood.
It’s been about fifteen years since the last Spinal Tap album, a factor the sequel incorporates into its premise. “We created this whole idea that there’s bad blood, they’re not speaking to each other,” says Reiner, “but they now are forced together because of a contract” dictating that they must give one last performance, a prospect suddenly made viable when their song “Big Bottom” goes viral. As unrecognizable as both pop culture in general and the music industry in particular have become over the past four decades, Reiner assures us that David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls “have not grown emotionally, musically, or artistically. They are stuck in that heavy-metal world.” In a Hollywood movie, such a flagrant lack of character development would constitute a violation of storytelling laws; in rock, it’s unflinching realism.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It seems not to be documented whether the Santa Ana winds were blowing when Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied shot Meshes of the Afternoon. But everything about the film itself suggests that they must have been, so vivid does its atmosphere of luxuriantly arid paranoia remain these 62 years later. Despite its runtime of less than fifteen minutes and the obviously modest means of its production, it’s long been canonized as not just a standard introduction to experimentalism in film studies classes, but also a critical favorite. In fact, it placed in the last Sight and Sound critics poll of the best films of all time at a respectable #16, above Abbas Kiarostami’s Close‑Up and below John Ford’s The Searchers.
Meshes of the Afternoon ranks at #62 on the directors poll, a spot that sounds low until you consider that it’s shared with the likes of Late Spring, Some Like It Hot, Sátántangó, Blade Runner, and Lawrence of Arabia. Still, it’s a bit surprising that it didn’t come in higher, given the obvious influence both direct and indirect of its early Los Angeles-noir surrealism on so many subsequent major motion pictures.
“Had Californian sunlight ever looked as suggestive or sinister before the sharply etched dream world of Meshes of the Afternoon?” asks Ian Christie in his short accompanying essay at the British Film Institute’s site. “Certainly, it soon would, in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and many later films noirs” — not to mention the “many traditions over eight decades” it has inspired since.
Those include the oeuvre of the late David Lynch, which constitutes a tradition unto itself, but even the most casual filmgoer could hardly watch Meshes of the Afternoon without feeling deep resonances between it and a great many of the non-experimental movies they’ve seen since. The story, such as one can decipher it, has to do with a woman alone at home, haunted by a glimpse of a hooded figure with a mirror for a face and unable to tell whether she’s on the inside or outside of a dream. By the end, she is dead, but on which plane of reality? There are, of course, no answers, just as there is no dialogue, explanatory or otherwise. But Deren and Hackenschmied knew they didn’t need it, being fully aware that they were working in a medium where everything important can be conveyed visually — and, ideally, experienced by viewers just as if they were dreaming it themselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We all know Marshall McLuhan’s pithy, endlessly quotable line “the medium is the message,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The development of communication technologies may genuinely present us with a chicken or egg scenario. After all, only a culture that already prized constant visual stimuli but grossly undervalued physical movement would have invented and adopted television.
In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord ties the tendency toward passive visual consumption to “commodity fetishism, the domination of society by ‘intangible as well as tangible things,’ which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.” It seems an apt description of a screen-addicted culture.
What can we say, then, of a culture addicted to charts and graphs? Earliest examples of the form were often more elaborate than we’re used to seeing, hand-drawn with care and attention. They were also not coy about their ambitions: to condense the vast dimensions of space and time into a two-dimensional, color-coded format. To tidily sum up all human and natural history in easy-to-read visual metaphors.
This was as much a religious project as it was a philosophical, scientific, historical, political, and pedagogical one. The domains are hopelessly entwined in the 18th and 19th centuries. We should not be surprised to see them freely mingle in the earliest infographics. The creators of such images were polymaths, and deeply devout. Joseph Priestley, English chemist, philosopher, theologian, political theorist and grammarian, made several visual chronologies representing “the lives of two thousand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD” (conveying a clear message about the sole importance of men).
“After Priestley,” writes the Public Domain Review, “timelines flourished, but they generally lacked any sense of the dimensionality of time, representing the past as a uniform march from left to right.” Emma Willard, “one of the century’s most influential educators” set out to update the technology, “to invest chronology with a sense of perspective.” In her 1836 Picture of Nations; or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire, above (view and download high resolution images here), she presents “the biblical Creation as the apex of a triangle that then flowed forward in time and space toward the viewer.”
The perspective is also a forced point of view about origins and history. But that was exactly the point: these are didactic tools meant for textbooks and classrooms. Willard, “America’s first professional female mapmaker,” writes Maria Popova, was also a “pioneering educator,” who founded “the first women’s higher education institution in the United States when she was still in her thirties…. In her early forties, she set about composing and publishing a series of history textbooks that raised the standards and sensibilities of scholarship.”
Willard recognized that linear graphs of time did not accurately do justice to a three-dimensional experience of the world. Humans are “embodied creatures who yearn to locate themselves in space and time.” The illusion of space and time on the flat page was an essential feature of Willard’s underlying purpose: “laying out the ground-plan of the intellect, so far as the whole range of history is concerned.” A proper understanding of a Great Man (and at least one Great Woman, Hypatia) version of history—easily condensed, since there were only around 6,000 years from the creation of the universe—would lead to “enlightened and judicious supporters” of democracy.
History is represented literally as a sacred space in Willard’s 1846 Temple of Time, its providential beginnings formally balanced in equal proportion to its every monumental stage. Willard’s intent was expressly patriotic, her trappings self-consciously classical. Her maps of time were ways of situating the nation as a natural successor to the empires of old, which flowed from the divine act of creation. They show a progressive widening of the world.
“Half a century before W.E.B. Du Bois… created his modernist data visualizations for the 1900 World’s Fair,” Popova writes, The Temple of Time “won a medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in London.” Willard accompanied the infographic with a statement of intent, articulating a media theory, over a hundred years before McLuhan, that sounds strangely anticipatory of his famous dictum.
The poetic idea of “the vista of departed years” is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medium, the picture will, by frequent inspection, be formed within, and forever remain, wrought into the living texture of the mind.
The history of medicine is, for the most part, a history of dubious cures. Some were even worse than dubious: for example, the ingestion of antimony, which we now know to be a highly toxic metal. Though it may not occupy an exalted (or, for students in chemistry class, particularly memorable) place on the periodic table today, antimony does have a fairly long cultural history. Its first known use took place in ancient Egypt when stibnite, one of its mineral forms, was ground into the strikingly dark eyeliner-like cosmetic kohl, which was thought to ward off bad spirits.
Ancient Greek civilization recognized antimony less for its effects on the spirit world than on the human one. The Greeks knew full well that the stuff was toxic, but also kept returning to it as a potential form of medicine.
Ancient Rome made its own practical use of antimony, not least in metallurgy, but also kept up certain lines of inquiry into its curative properties. As a substance, it was well-placed to capture imaginations more intensely in the medieval age of alchemy. By the late seventeenth century, people were drinking wine out of antimony cups, as unboxed in the video from the Victoria and Albert Museum above.
“The purpose of it is to try and make you vomit and have diarrhea and sweat a lot,” says Angus Patterson, the V&A’s senior curator of metalwork. In theory, this would re-balance the “humors” of which medieval medicine conceived of the body as being composed. Fancy cups like the one in the video, which was once owned by a lord, weren’t the only antimony objects used for this purpose: the metal was also forged into so-called “perpetual pills,” meant to be swallowed, retrieved from the excrement, then swallowed again when necessary — for multiple generations, in some cases, as a kind of family heirloom. “Not sure I’d fancy swallowing a pill that had been through my grandpa,” Patterson adds, “but needs must when you have a stomachache in 1750.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is such a work of art that to split it up into nine tracks—like classic rock radio has done for years—always sounds nonsensical. How can you just end “Breathe” on that final chord and not follow it with the analog drones of “On the Run”? How can you play “Brain Damage” and not end with “Eclipse”? And how dare you fade the long coda of “Money” and segue into a car commercial?
You can’t, morally speaking, I’m telling you.
So that’s why I like the cut of the jib of the Martin Miller Session Band, who commit to covering the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon in this one long studio performance. According to Miller’s Patreon page, this is the only full album they’ve covered so far, and they pull through admirably.
And the thing that is refreshing here is that the band covers the album up to a point, but not slavishly. It’s not the Flaming Lips’ deconstruction or the surprisingly still listenable 8‑Bit version, but neither is it the kind of tribute band like Brit Floyd (below). When Miller solos, he’s not aping David Gilmour. The keyboardist Marius Leicht has his own knobs to twiddle, so to speak. And drummer Felix Lehrmann will never ever be confused for Nick Mason. (In fact, he gets a lot of grief in the comments for being too flash, but when you watch Miller’s other videos and see him giving Stewart Copeland a run for his money on their Police medley, you see where he’s coming from.)
Knowing what you’re in for, questions arise: are they going to include the various spoken samples sprinkled throughout (“I don’t know I was really drunk at the time,” “There is no dark side of the moon really…”). Answer: yes indeed, and funny they are too. Does a saxophonist turn up for “Money” and “Us and Them”? Answer: Yes, and it’s Michal Skulski. Who can possibly match Clare Torry’s pipes on “The Great Gig in the Sky”? Jenny Marsala does, thank you very much.
So I would settle in and try to unlearn your memory of every note and beat on the 1973 classic. By doing so, you’ll hear the album anew.
Dan Pelzer died earlier this year at the age of 92, leaving behind a handwritten list of all the books he’d read since 1962. His family had it digitized, put it online, and now it’s gone viral, somewhat to the surprise of those of us who’d never heard of him before. But that, it seems, is how the unprepossessing Pelzer himself would have wanted it, according to the impression given by his grown children when interviewed about the popularity of their father’s more than 100-page-long reading list. He began keeping it when he was stationed in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer, and kept it up until the end of his reading days in 2023, long after he retired from his job as a social worker at an Ohio juvenile correctional facility.
Examined together, whether in the form of a complete scan or a searchable PDF, the 3,599 books, most of them checked out from the library, that Pelzer recorded having read constitute a personal cultural history of the past six decades. Described as a devout Catholic, he certainly seems to have been consistent in his pursuit of an interest in not just the history of Christianity in particular, but the history of western civilization in general.
It comes as no surprise to see him dig into Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization series in the early nineteen-eighties, slightly startling though it is that he read its eleven volumes in an apparently random order. This habit turns out to be characteristic: though reputed to finish every book he started, he only got around to six volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, starting with the eleventh and ending with the tenth.
Interspersed with the books of The Story of Civilization are the likes of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, John Irving’s The World According to Garp, and three novels by Ken Follett. Though abidingly concerned with the story of mankind, Pelzer appears also to have had a weakness for genre thrillers (he’s remembered as a big John Grisham fan) and topical books-of-the-moment. But whether reading at high‑, low‑, or middlebrow level, he seems to have been willing to give all major religions and political philosophies, as well as some minor ones, a fair hearing — or rather, a fair reading. This makes for striking juxtapositions in his list: Ayn Rand followed by L. Ron Hubbard, Ta-Nehisi Coates by Jonathan Haidt. In that respect, he was, perhaps, the ideal of the engaged, “democratic” common reader one imagines populating America while somehow never encountering. If his list raises the question of why he didn’t go into a more intellectually ambitious line of work, it also, in a way, answers it: what time would that have left him to read?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) made some heady art. His whole goal was to “put art back in the service of the mind,” or to create what Jasper Johns once called the “field where language, thought and vision act on one another.” And that’s precisely what Duchamp’s 1926 avant-garde film Anémic Cinéma delivers. You can watch a restored version above.
Drawing on his inheritance, Duchamp shot Anémic Cinéma (almost a palindrome) in Man Ray’s studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret. The Dada-inspired film features nine whirling optical illusions, known as Rotoreliefs, alternating with spiraling puns and complex word play. Vision acts on language and thought, indeed.
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