A 10-Course Introduction to Data Science from Johns Hopkins
Data is now everywhere. And those who can harness data effectively stand poised to innovate and make impactful decisions. This holds true in business, medicine, healthcare, education and other spheres of life.
Enter the 10-course Introduction to Data Science from Johns Hopkins. Offered on the Coursera platform, this course sequence covers “the concepts and tools you’ll need throughout the entire data science pipeline, from asking the right kinds of questions to making inferences and publishing results.” The program includes courses covering The Data Scientist’s Toolbox, R Programming, Getting and Cleaning Data, Developing Data Products and more. There’s also a Capstone Project where students can build a data product using real-world data.
Students can formally enroll in the Introduction to Data Science specialization and receive a certificate for each course they complete–a certificate they can share with prospective employers and their professional networks. They’ll also leave with a portfolio demonstrating mastery of the material covered in the sequence. Hopkins estimates that most learners can complete the sequence in 3–7 months, during which time students will be charged $49 per month.
Alternatively, students can audit individual courses for free. When you enroll in a course, look carefully for the Audit option. Note: Auditors cannot receive a certificate for each completed course.
If would like to formally enroll in the Introduction to Data Science sequence, you can start a 7‑Day Free Trial and size things up here.
Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Related Content:
Read More...100 Days of Dante: Join the Largest Divine Comedy Reading Group in the World (Starts September 8)
This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death — which means it also marks the 701st anniversary of his great work the Divina Commedia, known in English as the Divine Comedy. We’ve all got to go some time, and it’s somehow suitable that Dante went not long after telling the tale of his own journey through the afterlife, complete with stops in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. It remains a journey we can all take and re-take — and interpretively grapple with — still these seven centuries later. Starting this month, you can take it as a group tour, so to speak, by joining 100 Days of Dante, the largest Dante reading group in the world.
A project of Baylor University’s Honors College (with support from several other American educational institutions), 100 Days of Dante has launched a web site “through which modern seekers and pilgrims can follow the great epic poem with free video presentations three times a week.”
So writes Aleteia’s John Burger, who explains that “the three books of the Divine Comedy, known in Italian as Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, are divided into 33 chapters known as cantos. [Inferno actually had 34.] Each video will present one canto, with commentary on it from leading experts in Dante studies.” You can also read the entire work on 100 Days of Dante’s web site, in English or Italian — a language Dante’s own poetry did much to shape.
Nobody interested in the language of Italy, let alone the country’s history and culture, can do without experiencing the Divine Comedy. One of 100 Days of Dante’s aims is a re-emphasis of its nature as a thoroughly religious work, one that renders in vivid, sometimes harrowing detail the worldview held by Christians of Dante’s place and time. But believer or otherwise, you can join in the reading from when it begins on September 8, to when it concludes on Easter 2022. You may well find, as the long Italy-resident English writer and translator Tim Parks observes, that Dante has a way of slipping through convenient interpretative frameworks cultural, historical, and even religious. “Long after the fires of Hell have burned themselves out,” he writes, “the debate about the Divina Commedia rages on.” Find more educational resources on Dante and The Divine Comedy below.
Related Content:
A Free Online Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale University
A Digital Archive of the Earliest Illustrated Editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1487–1568)
Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Comedy? An Animated Video Makes the Case
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.
Read More...Google Data Analytics Certificate: 8 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months
During the pandemic, Google launched a series of Career Certificates that will “prepare learners for an entry-level role in under six months.” The new career initiative includes certificates concentrating on Project Management and UX Design. And now also Data Analytics, a burgeoning field that focuses on “the collection, transformation, and organization of data in order to draw conclusions, make predictions, and drive informed decision making.”
Offered on the Coursera platform, the Data Analytics Professional Certificate consists of eight courses, including “Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere,” “Prepare Data for Exploration,” “Data Analysis with R Programming,” and “Share Data Through the Art of Visualization.” Overall this program “includes over 180 hours of instruction and hundreds of practice-based assessments, which will help you simulate real-world data analytics scenarios that are critical for success in the workplace. The content is highly interactive and exclusively developed by Google employees with decades of experience in data analytics.”
Upon completion, students–even those who haven’t pursued a college degree–can directly apply for jobs (e.g., junior or associate data analyst, database administrator, etc.) with Google and over 130 U.S. employers, including Walmart, Best Buy, and Astreya. You can start a 7‑day free trial and explore the courses here. If you continue beyond the free trial, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That translates to about $235 after 6 months, the time estimated to complete the certificate.
Explore the Data Analytics Certificate by watching the video above. Learn more about the overall Google career certificate initiative here. And find other Google professional certificates here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Related Content:
Read More...The Brilliant 19th-Century Astronomical Drawings of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
The first photo of the moon was taken in 1850 by Louis Daguerre, from whom the daguerrotype gets its name. We have no idea what that first image looked like as it was lost in a studio fire. But the need to catalog the heavens with modern tools had started, and was both fascinating as it was lacking. Into this evolution of science and art stepped Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, the French immigrant, living in the States, an amateur scientist and an illustrator. He would dismiss photography of the heavens as “so blurred and indistinct that no details of any great value can be secured.” And by illustrating instead by he saw through telescopes, he secured a place in art *and* science history.
Trouvelot might have thought his scientific papers would be his legacy. He wrote fifty in his lifetime. Instead it is his roughly 7,000 illustrations of planets, comets, and other phenomena that still please us to this day. The New York Public Library has put 15 of his best up on their site, and over at this page, you can compare what Trouvelot saw—-the great astronomer Emma Converse called Trouvelot the “prince of observers”—-to photos from NASA’s archive.
Even if his Mars is a bit fanciful, looking translucent like a fish egg, his understanding of the planet echoes in the following century of sci-fi paranoia. Something strange must be there, he suggests.
Harvard hired him to sketch at their college’s observatory, and he used pastels to bring the planets to life. Engraving or ink would not have worked as well as these soft shapes and determined lines. His rendering of the moon surface is accurate but also fanciful, like whipped cream. And his sun spots might not be accurate, but they replicated the god-like forces at work on its tumultuous surface. His Saturn is the most realistic of them all. Even the NASA image doesn’t look too different to Trouvelot’s art.
These images also help rehabilitate Trouvelot’s other legacy—-the dreaded Gypsy Moth. Before his stint as amateur scientist, he was also an amateur entomologist, and while researching silkworms and silk production, accidentally let European gypsy moths into North America, where they wreaked havoc on the forests of North America. Saturn’s rings may look the same back then as they do now, but so does the damage of the gypsy moth, which according to Wikipedia is up to $868 million in damages per year.
Related Content:
A 9th Century Manuscript Teaches Astronomy by Making Sublime Pictures Out of Words
Jocelyn Bell Burnell Changed Astronomy Forever; Her Ph.D. Advisor Won the Nobel Prize for It
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Listen to Plato Invent the Myth of Atlantis (360 B.C)
Myths emerge from the murky depths of human prehistory, leaving their sources shrouded in mystery. But on rare occasions, we can trace them to a single point of origin. The myth of Atlantis, for example, the ancient civilization that supposedly sank into the sea, has one and only one source — Plato — who told the story in both the Timaeus and Critias, sometime around 360 BC, as an allegory for corruption and civilizational decay.
Plato puts the tale of Atlantis nesos, the “island of Atlas,” in the mouth of the aged Critias, a character in both dialogues, who says he heard the story second-hand from Solon — “not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets” — who in turn brought it from Egypt, where he supposedly heard it from a priest in a city called Sais.
As you can hear in the dialogue that bears his name, read above in the Voices of the Past video, Critias gives a lengthy description of the island’s size (in Timaeus it is “larger than Libya and Asia put together”), its location (“the Pillars of Heracles”), and its geography, cities, peoples, and so forth. In Timaeus, Socrates declares that this tale (unlike his imaginary republics) “has the very great advantage of being fact not fiction.”
But there was never such a place in the ancient world. While islands have disappeared after earthquakes or volcanoes, “I don’t think there’s any question,” says geologist Patrick Nunn, “that the story of Atlantis is a myth.” Plato made up the lost civilization and formidable rival to Athens, who soundly defeated the Atlanteans, as a dramatic foil. “It’s a story that captures the imagination,” says Bard College professor of classics James Romm. Its purpose is illustrative, not historical.
[Plato] was dealing with a number of issues, themes that run throughout his work. His ideas about divine versus human nature, ideal societies, the gradual corruption of human society — these ideas are all found in many of his works. Atlantis was a different vehicle to get at some of his favorite themes.
Why has there been so much desire to find Plato’s account credible? Early modern European readers of Plato like Francis Bacon and Thomas More — authors of The New Atlantis and Utopia, respectively — treated Atlantis as philosophical allegory, a fiction like their own invented societies. But later interpreters believed it, from amateur scholars to colonial adventurers, explorers, and treasure hunters. Atlantis, wherever it is, some thought, must be full of sunken gold.
National Geographic quotes Charles Orser, curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany, who says, “Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there. Every place you can imagine.” Yet whatever similarities it may have had to a real place, Plato’s yarn was strictly parable: Its inhabitants were once divine. “Sired and ruled over by Poseidon, and thus half-gods and half-mortals,” writes Aeon, they “despised everything but virtue.”
But Atlantis grew corrupt in time, Critias tells us, “when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.”
Related Content:
Mythos: An Animation Retells Timeless Greek Myths with Abstract Modern Designs
Ancient Philosophy: Free Online Course from the University of Pennsylvania
What is the Good Life? Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Animated Videos
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...200 Comic Book Adaptations of Classic Novels Created (1941–1971): Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Hamlet & More
Thanks to “the rise of comics as a ‘respectable’ medium,” Ross Johnson writes at Barnes and Noble, graphic novel adaptations now constantly reimagine literary classics for young readers. One Goodreads list collects over 200 recent graphic adaptations of classics from Austen to Kafka. These adaptations “aim to honor and embellish rather than replace the books on which they are based,” writes Johnson, “because how could they?” They do, however, allow us to “see, literally and figuratively, the stories we love from new angles.” They also give kids and adults who may not fancy themselves readers new ways to access and enjoy literary classics.
But are graphic adaptations really a new phenomenon? They may be newly respectable, but they’ve been around since the very dawn of comic books as a medium. Superman debuted in 1938, Batman in 1939, and in 1941, the first issue of Classics Illustrated appeared — an adaptation of The Three Musketeers, followed by Ivanhoe and The Count of Monte Cristo. The series was founded by Russian-born publisher Albert Kanter, who immediately seized on the potential of comic books as educational tools during what is now known as the Golden Age of Comics.
Even as a prestige series supposedly promoting “great literature,” Classics Illustrated did not escape the notice of Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose book Seduction of the Innocent began the moral panic over comic books in the 1950s. Wertham found fault with the graphic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Uncle Tom’s Cabin for reducing the novels to their most stereotypical and sensationalist elements. It’s the kind of criticism we might find levied against graphic adaptations of literature today, and in many cases, it may be warranted.
Few accused these graphic literary adaptations of being great art in their own right. But they accomplished Kanter’s purpose of getting comics readers excited about classic novels. The series ran for 30 years, ending in 1971, and became an international phenomenon. In Brazil and Greece, it published adaptations of authors from those countries.
A Classics Illustrated Junior series appeared in 1953, bringing children comics versions of folktales and myths. After the series first run, special issues, reprints, and revivals appeared in later decades, as well a series of television films in the 70s and 80s. You can peruse over 200 of these adaptations digitally scanned at the Internet Archive, artifacts of the Golden Age and ancestors of our current explosion of graphic novel adaptations of classic literature. For a deeper study of this publication, you can purchase the 2017 book, Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History.
Related Content:
Free: Download 15,000+ Free Golden Age Comics from the Digital Comic Museum
Free Comic Books Turns Kids Onto Physics: Start With the Adventures of Nikola Tesla
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How Ramen Became the Currency of Choice in Prison, Beating Out Cigarettes
The last decade ushered in a slew of traditional Japanese-style ramen restaurants — enough to justify ramen maps to New York City, Chicago, and the Bay Area.
Yet most Americans still conceive of ramen as the pack of seasoning and dehydrated instant noodles that have long sustained broke artists and college students.
Add incarcerated persons to the list of packaged ramen’s most ardent consumers.
In the above episode of Vox’s series, The Goods, we learn how those ubiquitous cellophane packages have outstripped cigarettes and postage stamps as the preferred form of prison currency.
Ramen is durable, portable, packaged in standard units, available in the prison commissary, and highly prized by those with a deep need to pad their chow hall meals.
Ramen can be used to pay for clothing and hygiene products, or services like laundry, bunk cleaning, dictation, or custom illustration. Gamblers can use it in lieu of chips.
Ramen’s status as the preferred form of exchange also speaks to a sharp decline in the quantity and quality of food in American penal institutions.
Ethnographer Michael Gibson-Light, who spent a year studying homegrown monetary practices among incarcerated populations, notes that slashed prison budgets have created a culture of “punitive frugality.”
Called upon to model a demonstrably tough on crime stance and cut back on expenditures, the institutions are unofficially shunting many of their traditional costs onto the prisoners themselves.
In response, those on the inside have pivoted to edible currency:
What we are seeing is a collective response — across inmate populations and security levels, across prison cliques and racial groups, and even across states — to changes and cutbacks in prison food services…The form of money is not something that changes often or easily, even in the prison underground economy; it takes a major issue or shock to initiate such a change. The use of cigarettes as money in U.S. prisons happened in American Civil War military prisons and likely far earlier. The fact that this practice has suddenly changed has potentially serious implications.
Ramen may be a relatively new development in the prison landscape, but culinary experimentation behind bars is not. From Pruno prison wine to Martha Stewart’s prison grounds crabapple jelly, it’s a nothing ventured, nothing gained type of deal. Work with what you’ve got.
Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez, who appears in Vox’s video, collected a number of the most adventurous recipes in his book, Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars. Anyone can bring some variety on the spur of the moment by sprinkling some of your ramen’s seasoning packet into your drinking water, but amassing the ingredients for an ambitious dish like Orange Porkies — chili ramen plus white rice plus ½ bag of pork skins plus orange-flavored punch — takes patience and perseverance.
Alvarez’s Egg Ramen Salad Sandwich recipe earns praise from actor Shia LeBoeuf, whose time served is both multiple and minimal.
Someone serving a longer sentence has a more compelling reason to search for the ramen-centered sense of harmony and wellbeing on display in Tampopo, the first “ramen western”:
Appreciate its gestalt. Savor the aromas.
Joe Guerrero, host of YouTube’s AfterPrisonShow, is not immune to the pleasures of some of his ramen-based concoctions, below, despite being on the outside for several years now.
You’re free to wrinkle your nose at the thought of snacking on a crumbled brick of uncooked ramen, but Guerrero points out that someone serving a long sentence craves variety in any form they can get. Experiencing it can tap into the same sense of pride as self-governance.
Guerrero’s recipes require a microwave (and a block of ramen).
Even if you’re not particularly keen on eating the finished product, there’s a science project appeal to his Ramen Noodle Cookie. It calls for no additional ingredients, just ten minutes cooking time, an outrageous prospect in a communal setting with only one microwave.
Related Content:
The Proper Way to Eat Ramen: A Meditation from the Classic Japanese Comedy Tampopo (1985)
What Goes Into Ramen Noodles, and What Happens When Ramen Noodles Go Into You
Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyazaki Shows Us How to Make Instant Ramen
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...A First Look at How Tony Soprano Became Tony Soprano: Watch the New Trailer for The Many Saints of Newark
When The Sopranos drew to a close fourteen years ago, its ambiguous yet somehow definitive final scene hardly promised a continuation of the New Jersey mafia saga. Since then, fans have had to make do with reflections, histories, and exegeses, up to and including re-watch podcasts hosted by the actors themselves. As time has passed the show has only drawn higher and higher acclaim, which can’t be said about every product of the ongoing “golden age of television drama” The Sopranos got started. A return to the well was perhaps inevitable, and indeed has just been announced: The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by David Chase, the creator credited with contributing to the original series a significant portion of its genius.
Onscreen, The Sopranos drew its power from one Soprano above all: local mob boss Tony Soprano, as portrayed by James Gandolfini in what has been ranked among the greatest screen acting achievements of all time. Whether or not Tony survived that final scene, Gandolfini died in 2013, and ever since it has been impossible to imagine any other actor portraying the character — or at least portraying the character in a modern-day setting.
Telling the story of a Tony Soprano in his youth, with a young actor necessarily playing him, has remained a viable proposition. Into that role, for the 1960s and 70s-set The Many Saints of Newark, has stepped Gandolfini’s real-life son Michael.
For the then-20-year-old Michael Gandolfini, taking over his father’s role had to be a daunting prospect, especially since he’d never seen The Sopranos before. At least one binge-watch of the series (among other rigorous forms of preparation) later, he delivered the performance of which you can take a first look in The Many Saints of Newark’s new trailer above. “As rival gangs try to wrest control from the DiMeo crime family in the race-torn city of Newark,” Consequence Film’s Ben Kaye writes of its story, the young Anthony Soprano, a promising but indifferent student with an eye on college, “gets swept up in the violence and crime by his uncle Dickie Moltisanti.” As Sopranos fans know full well, “Anthony becomes the feared mob head Tony Soprano and treats Dickie’s son, Christopher, as his protégé.” Evidently, an antihero of Tony’s stature is made, not born.
Related Content:
How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopranos
David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Sopranos’ Final Scene
James Gandolfini Shows Kinder, Softer, Gentler Side on Sesame Street (2002)
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.
Read More...The Acoustics of Stonehenge: Researchers Build a Model to Understand How Sound Reverberated within the Ancient Structure
It’s impossible to resist a Spinal Tap joke, but the creators of the complete scale model of England’s ancient Druidic structure pictured above had serious intentions — to understand what those inside the circle heard when the stones all stood in their upright “henge” position. A research team led by acoustical engineer Trevor Cox constructed the model at one-twelfth the actual size of Stonehenge, the “largest possible scale replica that could fit inside an acoustic chamber at the University of Salford in England, where Cox works,” reports Bruce Bower at Science News. The tallest of the stones is only two feet high.
This is not the first time acoustic research has been carried out on Stonehenge, but previous projects were “all based on what’s there now,” says Cox. “I wanted to know how it sounded in 2200 B.C., when all the stones were in place.” The experiment required a lot of extrapolation from what remains. The construction of “Stonehenge Lego” or “Minihenge,” as the researchers call it, assumes that “Stonehenge’s outer circle of standing sarsen stones — a type of silcrete rock found in southern England — had originally consisted of 30 stones.” Today, there are 17 sarsen stones in the outer circle among the 63 complete stones remaining.
“Based on an estimated total 157 stones placed at the site around 4,200 years ago, the researchers 3‑D printed 27 stones of all sizes and shapes,” Bower explains. “Then, the team used silicone molds of those items and plaster mixed with other materials to re-create the remaining 130 stones. Simulated stones were constructed to minimize sound absorption, much like actual stones at Stonehenge.” Once Cox and his team had the model completed and placed in the acoustic chamber, they began experimenting with sound waves and microphones, measuring impulse responses and frequency curves.
What were the results of this sonic Stonehenge recreation? “We expected to lose a lot of sound vertically, because there’s no roof,” says Cox. Instead, researchers found “thousands upon thousands of reflections as the sound waves bounced around horizontally.” Participants in ritual chants or musical celebrations inside the circle would have heard the sound amplified and clarified, like singing in a tiled bathroom. For those standing outside the monument, or even within the outer circle of stones, the sound would have been muffled or dampened. Likewise, the arrangement would have dampened sound entering the inner circle from outside.
Indeed, the effect was so pronounced that “the placement of the stones was capable of amplifying the human voice by more than four decibels, but produced no echoes,” notes Artnet. This suggests that the site’s acoustic properties were not accidental, but designed as part of its essential function for an elite group of participants, “even though the site’s construction would have required a huge amount of manpower.” This is hardly different from other monumental ancient religious structures like pyramids and ziggurats, built for royalty and an elite priesthood. But it’s only one interpretation of the structure’s purpose.
While Cox and his team do not believe acoustics were the primary motivation for Stonehenge’s design — astrological alignment seems to have been far more important — it clearly played some role. Other scholars have their own hypotheses. Research still needs to account for environmental factors — or why “Stonehenge hums when the wind blows hard,” as musicologist Rupert Till points out. Some have speculated the stones may have been instruments, played like a giant xylophone, a theory tested in a 2013 study conducted by researchers from the Royal College of Art, but this, too, remains speculative.
As the great Stonehenge enthusiast Nigel Tufnel once sang, “No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.” But whatever it sounded like, Cox and his colleagues have shown that the best seats were inside the inner circle. Read the research team’s full article here.
Related Content:
The Ancient Astronomy of Stonehenge Decoded
The Spinal Tap Stonehenge Debacle
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...This Is “The End”: A Video Exploration of The Doors’ Existential Epic
If you had broken up with your college boyfriend and he told you that he written an 11-minute song about you while on enough LSD to kill a horse, would you want to hear it? Or would you block his number on your phone?
Or maybe because said boyfriend is Jim Morrison and the band is the Doors and the song is “The End,” we’ll let it slide, because whether or not you think Jim’s lyrics are super deep or supercilious, the groove is undeniable, four small furry musicians gathered together in a studio and grooving on a raga, conjuring up Eastern mysticism with Western instruments.
In Polyphonic’s explainer video on “The End,” he pulls apart The Doors’ magnum opus, the closer to its 1967 debut album, analyzing the song in real time as it unspools. (There’s a few moments where Polyphonic and Morrison are vocalizing at the same time—we recommend turning on captions).
The girlfriend in question was Mary Werbelow, Morrison’s steady in the early ‘60s before he chose the path of putting his poetry to music. The Werbelow/Morrison couple had to die for the Doors to be born, in a sense, and Morrison started the lyrics as a goodbye song, a standard pop trope at the time. (There’s a very touching, rare interview with Werbelow here). But Morrison took it in another direction, we could say.
“The End” might be the first musical example of the Psychotronic Breakup genre. Defined by Noah Segan and Adam Egypt Mortimer when talking about film, the Psychotronic Breakup genre “uses dream imagery, paranormal ideas, or the horror genre to express the emotional drama of heartbreak.” Segan and Mortimer’s definition deals only with film, but Morrison does the same thing with song, a little over ten years before the films they discuss. “The End” is a breakup song that breaks down the psyche like LSD, sending the injured party back to basics, and into a universe of archetypes. Things are dying. Things are being reborn. There’s a blue bus which is calling us, and that is either a reference to the Solar Boat in Egyptian mythology or a reference to the Santa Monica bus system (according to one wag in the comments). Or hey, maybe it is both, because Morrison is tapping into something here, much like James Joyce created layers of myth within the quotidian. (Morrison achieves this by walking backwards into it, however.)
Polyphonic gets into the song’s Oedipal Cliff Notes section, describing how it all came fluming out of Morrison on stage, the band having dragged him to a gig at the Whiskey a Go-Go after he consumed “10,000 mikes” (i.e. 10,000 micrograms, about ten full doses) of LSD. A few days later the “kill your teachers, kill your parents” riff was committed to tape, this time also on LSD.
For all its pretense the song still works. And though Morrison never did reconcile with his girlfriend, the song did find its soul mate when Francis Ford Coppola used “The End” as the opening to Apocalypse Now, another work of art that drained the life force from its creator. There are no real cover versions of “The End,” and there are no films past Coppola’s that can use it without irony. It exists like a totem, to be found and puzzled over.
(But because this is late capitalism and everything is terrible, Polyphonic’s segue into a sponsor ad at 11:46 is something wondrous to behold in its perverse beauty. Be warned, my only friend.)
Related Content:
“The Lost Paris Tapes” Preserves Jim Morrison’s Final Poetry Recordings from 1971
A Young, Clean Cut Jim Morrison Appears in a 1962 Florida State University Promo Film
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
