When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978–82)

in Music, Television | August 17th, 2016

“This is not a test!” the host shouts into his microphone. “This is an actual show!” If you lived in New York and had cable in the late 1970s, you may have witnessed it yourself — and you may well have needed the reminder, because this show neither looked nor felt like anything that ever aired before. A fixture on public access Channel D and Channel J from 1972 to 1982, it threw down a redefinition of televisual possibilities that hasn’t just survived as a time capsule of the downtown Manhattan scene at its creative rolling boil, but retains its anarchic charge to this day. Welcome, whether you first tuned in back then or have only just tuned in on the internet now, to Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.

O’Brien, who co-created and presided over the show, didn’t always shout, but when he did, he managed to retain his deadpan self-possession. He even kept his cool when hanging out, live on the air, with the regulars of a guest list including “David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, the B‑52s, Chris Burden, George Clinton, Iggy Pop, Steven Meisel, Mick Jones, James Chance, John Lurie, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, the Screamers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nile Rodgers, Kid Creole, the Offs, Alex Chilton, the Brides of Funkenstein, Arthur Russell, David McDermott, and Charles Rocket, just to name a few.” At its height, TV Party let its audience hang out with such luminaries almost every week as well — literally, if they managed to find their way to the studio.

Having attained subcultural fame as the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, the Cleveland-born O’Brien also engaged in such straightforwardly countercultural efforts as writing for, and later editing, the infamous journal of the cannabis lifestyle High Times.

That bit of status drew an invitation to appear on the early public-access variety program The Coca Crystal Show. The experience immediately inspired him to create one of his own, a strike against the threat to free speech he sensed when mass media meant just a few mainstream television channels. And so O’Brien, along with Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, launched TV Party, a drug-fueled re-interpretation of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark, “the TV show that’s a party,” as he put it in a memorably askew phrasing on its very first broadcast, “but which could be a political party.”

Here we have a few particularly memorable TV Party evenings, including a performance by the not-of-this-earth proto-glam-rocker Klaus Nomi, an interview of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (who became a regular presence on the show and a “little brother” figure to the crew), and an episode with Blondie. Vice put up a TV Party best-of a couple years ago, which has let a new generation experience what now seems strikingly like a predecessor of the shows created for the internet video platforms they frequent today. It also includes a 90-minute documentary about the history of TV Party, which provides the necessary historical and cultural context for those unfamiliar with the New York O’Brien describes as “like a third-world country.” Shot in the ghostly black-and-white one associates with 1970s video artists, its visual elements either psychedelically bleeding into or jaggedly cutting between one another, “the show could get abstract quickly,” remembers O’Brien.

But in upholding its mission to erase the distinction between performer and audience, TV Party belongs as much to the late 70s as it does to the 21st century. It used to the fullest extent possible the freedom of public-access television, very much the Youtube of its day. (Certainly the callers-in could sound just as abusive as Youtube commenters.) It even ended in the highly modern fashion of not getting canceled, but simply fading away, the stretches between episodes growing longer and longer. “Maybe Chris and I will start it up again,” O’Brien speculates in the documentary, but he presumably has his hands full with his latest talk show: Tea at the Beatrice with Glenn O’Brien, created especially for the internet. The sensibility may have changed — nobody fires up a joint on camera anymore — but the excitement of exploring uncharted media territory remains.

Klaus Nomi: The Brilliant Performance of a Dying Man

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hypnotic Performance on SNL (1979)

The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Three-Hour Mixtape Offers a Sonic Introduction to Underground Goth Music

in Music | August 17th, 2016

Image by Pedro Figueiredo, via Wikimedia Commons

Why, in my day we called it “post-punk” and we walked miles to find it in catacombs with secret passwords, far away from any mall apparel stores or beverage-sponsored music festivals….

Mostly rubbish, though I have heard many an old campaigner say as much, decrying Goth rock as a recent, devolution from more serious, avant-garde trends. Some amalgam of The Doors, Leonard Cohen, Nico and the Velvet Underground, The Damned, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Hammer horror films, early goth rock went spare, atmospheric, and punky, like the early Cure, or baroque, morose, and cabaret like Bauhaus, or any other number of respectable art-rock directions.

These bands, many of my cohort believe, had integrity, and much better taste than kids today. All that get off my lawn-ness makes an easy target, as does the increasing popularity of a genre of music made for and by unpopular people.

Mix blog Secret Thirteen, curator of the goth rock mix above, admits as much. “Goth has never been an easy affair to discuss,” reads the mix intro in idiosyncratic English: “Kitschy atmosphere of massive contemporary goth festivals and stereotyping discourses usually overwhelmed the textural and emotional core of goth.” Contemporary perceptions, fair or not, obscure the diversity—stylistically, that is… of the music, with its “diverse elements including Dada movement, surrealist aesthetics, post-modernism, French ‘fin-de-siecle’ poetry, 19^th century romanticism, punk, kraut, glam, shoegaze, ambient, folk, etc….”

Indeed, it’s all there, when a band with the abrasive low-camp, grindhouse punk of Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party shares a musical lineage with the early synthpop of Ministry (with DJ-scratching!) and the medieval- and world music-obsessed Dead Can Dance. But the key operator in these extremes is theatricality. Since Siouxsie Sioux’s fishnets and swastikas, Dave Vanian’s vampire costumes and pancake makeup, and Robert Smith’s enormous weeping willow hair and onstage mist-shrouded cathedrals of despair, goth has had to make overwrought spectacles of itself, at times horribly tacky ones.

But the Secret Thirteen mix, compiled by founder Justinas Mikulskis, reminds us it’s really about the music, by putting together “the deep cuts,” writes Electronic Beats, “none of this ‘Bela’s Lugosi’s Dead’ stuff” (referring to Bauhaus’ biggest hit).

Here instead we find “the boisterous deathrock of Mighty Sphincter, Specimen’s Batcave thrashiness, the artsy weirdness of Red Wedding and early 4AD stalwarts Mass.” It’s a very 80s mix, but unless you were digging deep in the crates of alternative record stores at the time, few names may be familiar. The Birthday Party shows up, and a band called Kommunity FK that had a very minor hit. Former Sex Pistol John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. appears with their pounding rant “Religion II.” The Virgin Prunes also make the cut, number 42 in the mix—a very much overlooked, and very disturbing band, often only known for their childhood and family association with U2. Find a complete list of the tracks at the bottom of this page.

It is overall, I think, an excellent way to approach “goth”—or one definition of it—free from the wardrobe squabbles and generational condescension. The mix, writes Secret Thirteen, isn’t intended as “encyclopedic or anthological” in nature, but is “rather presented as a narrative with unexpected twists and turns showcasing a wide variety of elements, moods.” Sort of like a good story by Poe, or a good B horror movie.

via Electronic Beats

The 120 Minutes Archive Compiles Clips & Playlists from 956 Episodes of MTV’s Alternative Music Show (1986–2013)

Stream 15 Hours of the John Peel Sessions: 255 Tracks by Syd Barrett, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees & Other Artists

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hear Marc Maron’s Long Talk with Werner Herzog

in Film, Technology | August 17th, 2016

Image by Erinc Salor and The Necessary Evil, via Wikimedia Commons

Heads up: In the latest episode of the WTF podcast, filmmaker Werner Herzog pays a visit to Marc Maron’s garage in Los Angeles, and they get into a wide-ranging conversation, talking about Herzog’s upbringing in war-torn Germany, his upcoming film projects and a good deal more. But inevitably they focus on Herzog’s new film, a meditation on the internet and technology called Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World, which opens in theaters this Friday. You can also watch it at home.

Feel free to stream Maron and Herzog’s conversation below. It starts around the 33:30 mark. Or hear it over at Maron’s website.

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33 Songs That Document the History of Feminist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork

in Gender, Music | August 16th, 2016

Women have always been central to punk rock, even though they had to fight very hard to get and stay there. As veteran punk journalist and musician Vivien Goldman writes at Pitchfork, “Resistance to our existence was an acknowledged fact of life.” And yet, “punk freed female musicians,” she argues. She knows of what she speaks, having observed firsthand the “laddist boystown” of rock before punk broke barriers for women, and having been a part of that barrier-breaking herself. Goldstein’s essay introduces us to a playlist (stream it above) compiled by the Pitchfork staff called “The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs,” which in a way acts as a critical complement to a recent publishing trend.

In the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about what central moments in punk looked like in memoirs from big names like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, the Slits’ Viv Albertine, and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. In Girl in a Band : A Memoir, Gordon describes scraping by in the “postapocalyptic hell” of New York circa 1979; Albertine’s book shows us the “astonishing level of violence” the Slits faced on the streets of London around the same time; and Brownstein’s autobiography immerses us in the mid-90s Pacific Northwest scene and her band’s attempt to “expand the notion of what it means to be female.”

That’s not even to mention Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir or Kathleen Hanna’s public remembrances. The wave of press does risk obscuring something crucial, however; punk has always had its stars, but its primary appeal has been that anyone, no matter who, can do it, and all of the women above began in that spirit. Even if many of the women who left their stamp on early and later punk did not become famous, their fans remember them, as do the many thousands of people who heard them and then went out to start their own bands.

But the angle in Pitchfork’s compilation is not simply “women in punk.” Their 33-song playlist follows the specific thread of what they call “feminist punk,” meaning “songs that make their feminist messages clear—not just songs by punks who are feminists.” The rubric means that in addition to all of the artists mentioned above, and obscure bands like The Bags and The Brat, the all-male Fugazi get a mention for their song “Suggestion,” in which Ian MacKaye sings from a woman’s perspective about “the aggressive objectification of women’s bodies.” The song is a “tentpole for male feminism in punk,” and we can think of it as a kind of benign tokenism and an important moment for other male punk bands who followed suit in denouncing the patriarchy.

The playlist spans four decades, beginning with Patti Smith in 1975 and ending with Downtown Boys in 2015. The best-known artists happen to arrive in the late 70s and the mid-90s (Hanna makes the list thrice with three different bands). Not coincidentally, these are the moments—in England and the U.S.—when feminist punks made the most noise, and Goldman points out just how much the women in these eras had in common:

Because women’s contributions are so often hidden from herstory, when the riot grrrl movement began in America, those women were virtually unaware that their UK sisters had been fighting parallel battles two decades earlier. But the Americans were way better funded and organized than we had been, lurching through no-woman’s‑land to make ourselves heard. It took awhile before Kurt Cobain championed the Raincoats and Sonic Youth bonded with the Slits.

Punk may be dead, or it may remain what Goldstein calls the “global music of rebellion.” Either way, Pitchfork’s playlist—with its critical commentary on each selection—offers young female artists making music in their bedrooms a sense of continuity with a long line of mostly DIY feminist punks who made “fissures and cracks, some crumbling walls” in the edifice of rock’s boy’s club. Goldman warns her target readers—who so clearly are those young bedroom guitarists, singers, producers, etc.—against complacency, but also leaves them with some clear, concise advice: “Where possible, please create a community with complementary skills. Nowadays, it often starts online. Still, try and find a way to actually, physically be with your new creative cohorts. Because nothing beats jamming with your sisters.”

See Pitchfork for the full, annotated playlist with Goldman’s introduction and hear the full playlist in order at the top of the post.

Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rockers” (1994)

Patti Smith Documentary Dream of Life Beautifully Captures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Oliver Sacks Explains the Biology of Hallucinations: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

in Neuroscience | August 16th, 2016

We all understand that hallucination involves seeing things that aren’t really there, but what are hallucinations themselves? “They don’t seem to be of our creation. They don’t seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception.” Those words come from Oliver Sacks, who would know. We featured a short clip of him discussing what he learned from his personal experience with LSD and amphetamines back in 2012, when his book Hallucinations had just come out. He died almost exactly three years later — and therefore just under a year ago — leaving behind a body of work from which we all stand to gain much understanding of the workings of the brain, as illuminated by both its normal and abnormal states.

In this 2009 TED Talk on what hallucinations reveal about our minds, Sacks tells of his experiences with one patient, elderly and blind, who kept “seeing” visions of “people in Eastern dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs.” Another, with limited eyesight, ” said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant. And he turned around. And then he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. And then the six figures came together again, like a concertina.” Another, with a small tumor on the occipital cortex, “would see cartoons. These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field, like a screen. And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog.”

Sacks connects all this to something called Charles Bonnet syndrome, first described by the naturalist of that name in 1760. Bonnet’s grandfather, who’d had cataract surgery (and 18th-century cataract surgery at that), said he saw things like handkerchiefs and wheels floating in midair. These hallucinations work differently than psychotic ones, which “address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you.” But Charles Bonnet syndrome produces an experience more like watching a film — a term Sacks’ patients could use to describe it, though obviously nobody could have in Bonnet’s day.

Bonnet, Sacks concludes, “wondered how, thinking about these hallucinations, as he put it, the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain. Now, 250 years later, I think we’re beginning to glimpse how this is done.” Thanks to Sacks’ inspiration of succeeding generations of neuroscientific researchers, that glimpse of how we “see with the eyes, but with the brain as well” will only widen.

This is What Oliver Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphetamines

Oliver Sacks Contemplates Mortality (and His Terminal Cancer Diagnosis) in a Thoughtful, Poignant Letter

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The 5 Books on President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List

in Books | August 16th, 2016

As he kicked off a summer vacation, President Obama released last week a free 39-song playlist for a summer day–essentially a soundtrack for a summer vacation. He also shared his summer reading list–five books which offer, notes the White House, “a mix of fiction and non-fiction, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning surf memoir, a psychological thriller, and a science fiction novel. They include:

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

For anyone interested in revisiting Pres. Obama’s five picks from last summer, we have them here:

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

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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 free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Harvard Puts Online a Huge Collection of Bauhaus Art Objects

in Art | August 16th, 2016

You may have first encountered the word Bauhaus as the name of a campy, arty post-punk band that influenced goth music and fashion. But you’ll also know that the band took its name from an even more influential art movement begun in Germany in 1919 by Walter Gropius. The appropriation makes sense; like the band, Bauhaus artists often leaned toward camp—see, for example, their costume parties—and despite their serious commitment, had a sense of humor about their endeavor to radically alter European art and design. But the Bauhaus movement has been unfairly pegged at times as overly serious: cold technologists and proponents of faceless glass and steel buildings and austere modernist furniture. That impression only tells a part of the tale.

When we speak of Bauhaus design, we often forget that the Bauhaus was also—and first principally—an art school. Until broken up by the Nazis in 1933, it operated under a rigorous course of training with a faculty who brought with them a variety of organic theories and practices—not all of them enamored of technology or 90-degree angles. Paul Klee, for example, mocked our fascination with machines in works like Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of Plants (top) and Wassily Kandinsky enacted his mystical theories of symbolism in increasingly abstract, vibrant canvases like Small Worlds, above.

Both of these paintings reside in Harvard’s special collection, “one of the first and largest collections relating to the Bauhaus,” and at the Harvard Museums website, you can find more works–in fact, more than 32,000 objects–by these artists and others like Oskar Schlemmer, who designed many of those outlandish costumes. (See some of those designs in his costumes for the Triadic Ballet, below.)

The Harvard Bauhaus collection demonstrates how the Bauhaus school “served as hothouse for a variety of ‘isms,’ from expressionism, Dadaism, constructivism, and functionalism.” The tendency to associate Bauhaus with primary colors and minimalist glass, steel, and concrete has much to do with some of its best-known faculty/alumni, like founder Gropius, and architects/designers Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen, and his student Charles Eames.

These names are represented in the Harvard collection, but so are “different facets of the Bauhaus and its legacy.” Paintings, photographs, ceramics, textiles, metalwork…. One section of the site, Pedagogy, shows us student work of artists like Herbert Bayer, below. Known for his “hard-edged ‘machine aesthetic,” Bayer’s traditional charcoal study of wool and wood shavings “appears antithetical to the school’s revolutionary program.” Yet it is an example of Bauhaus’ emphasis on fundamentals of technique, “pedagogical methods that persist in various form in art schools today.”

Harvard’s web site represents its physical collection, but it does not duplicate it. Many of the small images in its online archive do not expand to larger versions and cannot be downloaded. However, if you follow the guided tour by clicking “Continue Reading” under the site’s introduction, you’ll be able to click on the several dozen examples in each section and see them up close. You’ll also get a thorough survey of the Bauhaus school’s brief history and mission. The best way to access the collection is to click here, then scroll down to the box where it says “Search the Bauhaus special collection by keyword, title, artist, or object number, and by using the filters below.”

The only U.S. exhibition of Bauhaus artists during the school’s lifetime took place at Harvard in 1930, organized by undergraduates. And Walter Gropius taught for fifteen years at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, during which time “he built the school up as a bastion of architectural modernism.” Gropius and his students and colleagues changed the way we build and design. (See Gropius’ Total Theater for Erwin Piscator, above). The Harvard Museum Bauhaus collection also reminds us that they revolutionized art education in Europe and the U.S.

Kandinsky, Klee & Other Bauhaus Artists Designed Ingenious Costumes Like You’ve Never Seen Before

Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Create an Abstract Composition

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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When James Joyce & Marcel Proust Met in 1922, and Totally Bored Each Other

in Literature | August 15th, 2016

When we invoke the names of famous artists of the past, we refer to their most hallowed work—Orson Welles simultaneously means Citizen Kane, for example, or War of the Worlds, and H.G. Wells means The Time Machine or… War of the Words. It happens that when these two artists got together in 1940, they found that their worlds, which had already met in Welles’ notorious broadcast, had quite a lot to say to each other, genially trading stories, ideas, and mutual admiration.

Another historic meeting between two artists we might consider kindred, James Joyce of Ulysses fame and Marcel Proust of In Search of Lost Time, did not produce such a rich exchange. As Irish critic Arthur Power remarked, “Here are the two greatest literary figures of our time meeting and they ask each other if they like truffles.”

That, at least, is one account of the occasion in May of 1922, near the end of Proust’s life. The meeting took place at a party for Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev at the Majestic Hotel. Though both novelists propelled their greatest work forward by extrapolating from their favorite subject, themselves, the selves in their work are expansive and vast, taking in whole cities, nations, and social worlds. Both were voracious readers with incredible memories (as we certainly know of Proust) and an intuitive grasp of the cultural mechanisms of modernity. Such serious conversations the two of them might have.…

But one attendee, William Carlos Williams, paints a much more comic picture.….

Joyce, writes Ben Jackson at the London Review of Books, “arrived drunk and poorly dressed; Proust, draped in furs, opened the door.” Then, writes Williams, the two men sat in chairs side by side, while “partisans” waited for “the wits to sparkle and flash.” Instead, they kvetched in the sports-and-weather small talk of two elderly men meeting in a doctor’s waiting room, or two Samuel Beckett characters, beset by petty complaints of ultimate importance.

Joyce said, “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.”
Proust replied, “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.”
“I’m in the same situation,’ replied Joyce. ‘If I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye!”
“Charmé,” said Proust. “Oh, my stomach, my stomach.”

Ford Madox Ford confirms the account, but the party’s host, novelist Sydney Schiff denied it, reports Joyce’s most respected biographer Richard Ellmann. Ellmann doesn’t seem to favor one version or another, but he does give us Joyce’s own version, multiply attested. The Ulysses author remembered that their “talk consisted solely of the word ‘No.’ Proust asked me if I knew the duc du so-and-so. I said, ‘No.’” Proust was asked if he’d read Ulysses, and likewise replied in the negative. “The situation,” Joyce remembered, “was impossible.” Other guests remembered the meeting similarly.

In yet another version, we see the aftermath of their conference—in a story that resembles many an end-of-the-night-gone-sour scenario. Sydney Schiff’s wife Violet recalled Joyce drunkenly inviting himself into a taxi with the two of them and Proust, and promptly opening the window. “Knowing Proust’s deadly fear of drafts,” writes a Proust site, Violet “immediately closed the window.” When the cab arrived at Proust’s apartment, the French novelist “urged the Irishman to let the taxi take him home,” then “fled to his apartment.”

The many conflicting renditions all seem to agree on one thing: the meeting was a wash. Nonetheless, one author recently published what purports to be an entire book on the subject. Even he concludes “no one can say for certain exactly what they said to each other.” It’s tempting to think things might have gone otherwise, had they met earlier or in different circumstances, given Joyce’s tendency to get too drunk and Proust’s ill health and aversion to, well, company. The New Inquiry cites a remark Joyce made to Samuel Beckett about Proust: “If we had been allowed to meet and have a talk somewhere….”

Although it’s said that both writers confessed to not having read the other, Jackson notes that when Joyce “did admit to passing his eyes over a few pages he declared that he did not see ‘any special talent.’” He also confessed to some envy of Proust’s comfortable circumstances. Proust, who died six months later, left no mention of their meeting.

The Historic Meeting Between Dickens and Dostoevsky Revealed as a Great Literary Hoax

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The History of Civilization Mapped in 13 Minutes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

in History, Maps | August 15th, 2016

Above, watch “a geopolitical history of all empires, nations, kingdoms, armies and republics” unfold in 13 minutes. Created by a YouTuber who simply goes by the name “kardboardking,” the video stitches together “more than 500 world maps spanning all historical events.” We start in Sumer, somewhere around 5500–4000 BC. And end in 2014, with the world as we know it today.

Kardboardking is careful to point out that the clip features civilizations with a writing system and urban centers. Hence “pre-historical cultures” don’t make an appearance here. For a truly comprehensive history of the world, see: The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University.

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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 free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Watch Sunspring, the Sci-Fi Film Written with Artificial Intelligence, Starring Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley)

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | August 15th, 2016

This past spring the streets of Seoul, where I live, felt more like a sci-fi movie than usual. Large overhead video screens kept the population posted on the progress of a series of Go matches between 18-time world champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a piece of artificial intelligence developed by Google DeepMind. Computers have long had a special difficulty mastering that traditional game, but before long it became clear that this computer would win most of the matches, despite the human’s formerly unshakable prediction of the opposite outcome. What would artificial intelligence achieve next?

“In the wake of Google’s AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays,” say the video notes for the new short film Sunspring. They assembled hundreds of science fiction scripts, mostly from 1980s and 90s television shows and movies, and fed them into the artificial intelligence, which eventually named itself Benjamin, so as to teach it the mechanics of screenwriting. “Building a team including Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO’s Silicon Valley, they gave themselves 48 hours to shoot and edit whatever Benjamin decided to write.” Benjamin decided to write eight minutes’ worth of its own interpretation of the tropes of a certain kind of sci-fi entertainment.

It did come up with, fair to say, some dialogue a human screenwriter could only dream of — that is to say, words with the kind of unconscious logic that, delivered by living, breathing actors in physical spaces, take on weight, humor, and even an askew kind of meaning. (Middleditch’s despondent “I am not a bright light” will surely stay quotable for years to come.) You can learn more about the making of Sunspring from this Ars Technica piece by Annalee Newitz. Benjamin won’t put any sci-fi scribes out of work just yet, haunting though it may seem for a program to have come so close to doing something classically human as telling a story about the future. But remember, people had to write that program, just as people had to create AlphaGo; every achievement of artificial intelligence thus also counts as an achievement of humanity.

Two Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Talk to Each Other & Get Into a Deep Philosophical Conversation

Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Mashup Weaves Together 57 Famous Classical Pieces by 33 Composers: From Bach to Wagner

in Creativity, Music | August 15th, 2016

Musical mash up artist Grant Woolard has found a perfectly ethical way to sidestep copyright issues. Sample the greatest hits of long dead classical composers.

The pragmatically titled “Classical Music Mashup,” above, weaves 57 melodies by Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, and 30 other greats into one six minute composition.

Woolard invites listeners to separate out the strands, most of which will sound familiar, even if you are unable to name that tune.

(One sharp-eared listener not only accepted the challenge, but posted a complete listing of all the composers and compositions in chronological order with time stamps. Those who don’t mind SPOILERS can view it at the end of this post.)

Those who crave an even more interactive assignment can download the sheet music (for a small fee), then recruit two more pianists to perform the six-handed piece.

You can also buy an audio track of the composition here.

And now, the list of Woolard’s raw ingredients, compliments of youtube commenter, Yifeng Huang:

1. Mozart Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K525 0:01

2. Haydn Symphony 94 “Surprise” II 0:01

3. Beethoven Symphony 9 IV (Ode to Joy) 0:06

4. Mendelssohn Wedding March in Midsummer Night’s Dream, second theme 0:06

5. Dvorak Humoresque No.7 0:13

6. Wagner Lohengerin, Bridal Chorus 0:13

7. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 1 0:19

8. Saint-Saens Carnival of Animals: Swan 0:19

9. Bach Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 Prelude 1 0:19

10. Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture 0:29

11. Bach Cello Suite No. 1 0:32

12. Mendelssohn Song without Words “Spring” 0:33

13. Schubert Ave Maria 0:40

14. Schubert Symphony 8 “Unfinished” 0:46

15. Verdi “La Donna è Mobile” in Rigoletto 0:51

16. Boccherini String Quartet in E, Op.11 No.5, III. Minuetto 0:55

17. Beethoven für Elise 1:03

18. CPE Bach Solfeggietto 1:04

19. Paganini Capriccio 24 1:11

20. Mozart Piano Sonata No.11 III (Turkish March) 1:15

21. Grieg Piano Concerto 1:22

22. Mozart Requiem Lacrimosa 1:26

23. Schubert Serenade 1:30

24. Chopin Prelude in C minor 1:35

25. Strauss II Overture from Die Fledermaus (Bat) 1:46

26. Brahms 5 Lieder Op.49, IV. Wiegenlied (Lullaby) 1:46

27. Satie Gymnopedie 1:56

28. Debussy Arabesque 2:00

29. Holst Planets, Jupiter 2:05

30. Schubert Trout 2:14

31. Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 2:28

32. Mozart Variation on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 2:41

33. Schumann Op.68, No.10 Merry Peasant 2:47

34. Schubert Military March in D 2:54

35. Bach* (could be Petzold) Minuet in G 3:00

36. Mozart Piano Sonata No.16 in C, K545 3:07

37. Offenbach Can-can in “Orpheus in the underworld” 3:08

38. Beethoven Piano Sonata No.8 “Pathetique” II 3:18

39. Mozart Die Zauberflöte Overture 3:24

40. Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Overture 3:31

18′. CPE Bach Solfeggietto 3:44

41. Beethoven Symphony 5 “Fate” 3:47

6′. Wagner Wedding March 3:52

42. Rachmaninoff Prelude Op.3 No.2 in C# minor 3:53

18′. CPE Bach Solfeggietto 3:56

43. Chopin Piano Sonata No. 2 III. Funeral March 4:11

44. Williams Imperial March in Star War 4:19

45. Tchaikovsky Marche Slave 4:25

46. Smetana Ma Vlast II. Moldau 4:38

47. Tchaikovsky Nutcracker — Flower Waltz (not the main theme!) 4:45

48. Borodin Polovtsian Dances 4:45

49. Strauss II Blue Danube 4:58

50. Vivaldi Four Seasons I. Spring 5:03

51. Handel Messiah, Hallelujah 5:03

52. Handel The Entrance of the Queen of Sheba 5:08

53. Elgar Pomp and Circumstance Marches No. 1 5:15

54. Pachelbel Canon in D 5:21

55. Mozart Symphony No. 35 in D major (Haffner) K. 385, IV. Finale, Presto 5:27

56. Chopin Etude Op.25 No.9 in G flat, “Butterfly” 5:34

57. Bach Gavotte from French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816 5:42

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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