Revisit One of the Most Polarizing Albums in Rock History: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Which Came Out 50 Years Ago
Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed nearly destroyed his own career with one double album. Metal Machine Music sold 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its release and its removal from the market. More than a few of the many buyers who promptly returned it would have been expecting something like Sally Can’t Dance, Reed’s solo album from the previous year, whose slickly produced songs went down easier than anything he’d recorded with the Velvet Underground. What they heard when they put the new album on their turntables (or inserted the Quadrophonic 8‑track tape into their decks) was “nothing, absolutely nothing but screaming feedback noise recorded at various frequencies, played back against various other noise layers, split down the middle into two totally separate channels of utterly inhuman shrieks and hisses.”
That description comes from voluble Creem rock critic and avowed enthusiast of decadence Lester Bangs, who also happened to be one of Metal Machine Music’s most fervent defenders. At one point he declared it “the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum.” (“Number Two: Kiss Alive!”)
Much of what we know about the intentions behind this baffling album come from Bangs’ writings, including those that purport to transcribe conversations with Reed himself, who’d been one of the critic’s readiest verbal sparring partners. The inspiration, as Reed explained to Bangs, came from listening to composers Iannis Xenakis and La Monte Young, who dared to go beyond the boundaries of what most listeners would consider music at all. Reed also insisted that he’d deliberately inserted bits and pieces of Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical masters into his sonic maelstrom, though Bangs clearly didn’t buy it.
“Metal Machine Music doesn’t seem so weird now, does it?” asked an interviewer on Night Flight just a decade or so after the album’s release. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Reed says. “In light of Eno and all this stuff that came out now, it’s not nearly as insane and crazy as they said it was then.” Indeed, it sounds almost of a piece with an influential work of ambient music like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, though that album was meant to calm its listeners rather than drive them from the room. Over the half-century since its release, Metal Machine Music has accrued enough appreciation to be paid tributes like the live performances by German ensemble Zeitkratzer that have continued long after Reed’s death. The legacy of his “electronic instrumental composition,” as he said after one such concert in 2007, also includes a namesake clause in recording contracts stipulating that “the artist must turn in a record that sound like the artist that the record company signed — not come in with Metal Machine Music.”
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Lou Reed Creates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
Read More...How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes
You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two.
Actually, flow — the state of “effortless effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the German “rausch”, a dizzying sort of ecstasy.
Friedrich Nietzsche and psychologist William James both considered the flow state in depth, but social theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his definitions of flow:
Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.
Author Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, not only seems to spend a lot of time thinking about flow, as a leading expert on human performance, he inhabits the state on a fairly regular basis, too.
Chalk it up to good luck?
Good genes? (Some researchers, including retired NIH geneticist Dean Hamer and psychologist C. Robert Cloninger, think genetics play a part…)
As Kotler points out above, anyone can hedge their bets by clearing away distractions — all the usual baddies that interfere with sleep, performance, or productivity.
It’s also important to know thyself. Kotler’s an early bird, who gets crackin’ well before sunrise:
I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn everything off at the end of the day including unplugging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morning there’s nobody jumping into my inbox or assaulting me emotionally with something, you know what I mean?… I really protect that early morning time.
By contrast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clearing the cobwebs ’til early evening.
In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow triggers have been discovered, pre-conditions that keep attention focused in the present moment.
His website lists many of those triggers:
- Complete Concentration in the Present Moment
- Immediate Feedback
- Clear Goals
- The Challenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the challenge should seem slightly out of reach
- High consequences
- Deep Embodiment
- Rich Environment
- Creativity (specifically, pattern recognition, or the linking together of new ideas)
Kotler also shares University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer’s trigger list for groups hoping to flow like a well-oiled machine:
- Shared Goals
- Close Listening
- “Yes And” (additive, rather than combative conversations)
- Complete Concentration (total focus in the right here, right now)
- A sense of control (each member of the group feels in control, but still)
- Blending Egos (each person can submerge their ego needs into the group’s)
- Equal Participation (skills levels are roughly and equal everyone is involved)
- Familiarity (people know one another and understand their tics and tendencies)
- Constant Communication (a group version of immediate feedback)
- Shared, Group Risk
One might think people in the flow state would be floating around with an expression of ecstatic bliss on their faces. Not so, according to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slightly. Good news for anyone with resting bitch face!
(We’ll thank you to refer to it as resting flow state face from here on out.)
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.
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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?
Although it’s certainly more plausible than hypotheses like ancient aliens or lizard people, the idea that slaves built the Egyptian pyramids is no more true. It derives from creative readings of Old Testament stories and technicolor Cecil B. Demille spectacles, and was a classic whataboutism used by slavery apologists. The notion has “plagued Egyptian scholars for centuries,” writes Eric Betz at Discover. But, he adds emphatically, “Slaves did not build the pyramids.” Who did?
The evidence suggests they were built by a force of skilled laborers, as the Veritasium video above explains. These were cadres of elite construction workers who were well-fed and housed during their stint. “Many Egyptologists,” including archaeologist Mark Lehner, who has excavated a city of workers in Giza, “subscribe to the hypotheses that the pyramids were… built by a rotating labor force in a modular, team-based kind of organization,” Jonathan Shaw writes at Harvard Magazine. Graffiti discovered at the site identifies team names like “Friends of Khufu” and “Drunkards of Menkaure.”
The excavation also uncovered “tremendous quantities of cattle, sheep, and goat bone, ‘enough to feed several thousand people, even if they ate meat every day,’ adds Lehner,” suggesting that workers were “fed like royalty.” Another excavation by Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, famed Egyptian archaeologist and expert on the Great Pyramid, has found worker cemeteries at the foot of the pyramids, meaning that those who perished were buried in a place of honor. This was incredibly hazardous work, and the people who undertook it were celebrated and recognized for their achievement.
Laborers were also working off an obligation, something every Egyptian owed to those above them and, ultimately, to their pharaoh. But it was not a monetary debt. Lehner describes what ancient Egyptians called bak, a kind of feudal duty. While there were slaves in Egypt, the builders of the pyramids were maybe more like the Amish, he says, performing the same kind of obligatory communal labor as a barn raising. In that context, when we look at the Great Pyramid, “you have to say ‘This is a hell of a barn!’’’
The evidence unearthed by Lehner, Hawass, and others has “dealt a serious blow to the Hollywood version of a pyramid building,” writes Shaw, “with Charlton Heston as Moses intoning, ‘Pharaoh, let my people go!’” Recent archeology has also dealt a blow to extraterrestrial or time-travel explanations, which begin with the assumption that ancient Egyptians could not have possessed the know-how and skill to build such structures over 4,000 years ago. Not so. Veritasium explains the incredible feats of moving the outer stones without wheels and transporting the granite core of the pyramids 620 miles from its quarry to Giza.
Ancient Egyptians could plot directions on the compass, though they had no compasses. They could make right angles and levels and thus had the technology required to design the pyramids. What about digging up the Great Pyramid’s 2 million blocks of yellow limestone? As we know, this was done by a skilled workforce, who quarried an “Olympic swimming-pool’s worth of stone every eight days” for 23 years to build the Great Pyramid, notes Joe Hanson in the PBS It’s Okay to Be Smart video above. They did so using the only metal available to them, copper.
This may sound incredible, but modern experiments have shown that this amount of stone could be quarried and moved, using the technology available, by a team of 1,200 to 1,500 workers, around the same number of people archaeologists believe to have been on-site during construction. The limestone was quarried directly at the site (in fact the Sphinx was mostly dug out of the earth, rather than built atop it). How was the stone moved? Egyptologists from the University of Liverpool think they may have found the answer, a ramp with stairs and a series of holes which may have been used as a pulley system.
Learn more about the myths and the realities of the builders of Egypt’s pyramids in the It’s Okay to Be Smart “Who Built the Pyramids, Part 1″ video above.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra
Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over the subsequent centuries. Córdoba and Seville were reconquered practically one right after the other, in 1236 and 1248, respectively, and you can see the invasion of the first city animated in the opening scene of the Primal Space video above. “All over the land, Muslim cities were being conquered and taken over by the Christians,” says the companion article at Primal Nebula. “But amidst all of this, one city remained unconquered, Granada.”
“Thanks to its strategic position and the enormous Alhambra Palace, the city was protected,” and there the Alhambra remains today. A “thirteenth-century palatial complex that’s one of the world’s most iconic examples of Moorish architecture,” writes BBC.com’s Esme Fox, it’s also a landmark feat of engineering, boasting “one of the most sophisticated hydraulic networks in the world, able to defy gravity and raise water from the river nearly a kilometer below.”
The jewel in the crown of these elaborate waterworks is a white marble fountain that “consists of a large dish held up by twelve white mythical lions. Each beast spurts water from its mouth, feeding four channels in the patio’s marble floor that represent the four rivers of paradise, and then running throughout the palace to cool the rooms.”
The fuente de los Leones also tells time: the number of lions currently indicates the hour. This works thanks to an ingenious design explained both verbally and visually in the video. Anyone visiting the Alhambra today can admire this and other examples of medieval opulence, but travelers with an engineer’s cast of mind will appreciate even more how the palace’s builders got the water there at all. “The hill was around 200 meters above Granada’s main river,” says the narrator, which entailed an ambitious project of damming and redirection, to say nothing of the pool above the palace designed to keep the whole hydraulic system pressurized. The Alhambra’s heated baths and well-irrigated gardens represent the luxurious height of Moorish civilization, but they also remind us that, then as now, beneath every luxury lies an impressive feat of technology.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.
Read More...Unlock AI’s Potential in Your Work and Daily Life: Take a Popular Course from Google
Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex challenges. However, knowing how to use GenAI effectively isn’t always obvious. That’s where Google Prompting Essentials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and specific instructions—known as prompts—for AI. Once you can prompt well, you can unlock generative AI’s potential more fully.
Launched in April, Google Prompting Essentials has become the most popular GenAI course offered on Coursera. The course itself is divided into four modules. First, “Start Writing Prompts Like a Pro” will teach you a 5‑step method for crafting effective prompts. (Watch the video from Module 1 above, and more videos here.) With the second module, “Design Prompts for Everyday Work Tasks,” you will learn how to use AI to draft emails, brainstorm ideas, and summarize documents. The third module, “Speed Up Data Analysis and Presentation Building,” teaches techniques for uncovering insights in data, visualizing results, and preparing presentations. The final module, “Use AI as a Creative or Expert Partner,” explores advanced techniques such as prompt chaining and multimodal prompting. Plus, you will “create a personalized AI agent to role-play conversations and provide expert feedback.”
Offered on the Coursera platform, Google Prompting Essentials costs $49. Once you complete the course, you will receive a certificate from Google to share with your network and employer. Better yet, you will understand how to make GenAI a more useful tool in your life and work. Enroll here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Read More...Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code
If you find yourself grappling with an intellectual problem that’s gone unsolved for millennia, try taking a few months off and spending them on activities like swimming and meditating. That very strategy worked for a Cambridge PhD student named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a summer of non-research-related activities, returned to a text by the ancient grammarian, logician, and “father of linguistics” Pāṇini and found it newly comprehensible. The rules of its composition had stumped scholars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an article by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cambridge’s website, “Within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns started emerging, and it all started to make sense.”
Pāṇini composed his texts using a kind of algorithm: “Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same step, leaving scholars to agonize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s discovery that the difficult-to-interpret “metarule” meant to apply to such cases dictates that “between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.”
That may not be immediately understandable to those unfamiliar with the structure of Sanskrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clarifies with an example using mantra, one word from the language that everybody knows. “In the sentence ‘devāḥ prasannāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasannāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule conflict’ when deriving mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The derivation starts with ‘mantra + bhis.’ One rule is applicable to the left part ‘mantra’ and the other to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the correct form ‘mantraih.’ ”
Applying this rule renders interpretations of Pāṇini’s work almost completely unambiguous and grammatical. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has noted, to teach Sanskrit grammar to computers being programmed for natural language processing. It no doubt took him a great deal of intensive study to reach the point where he was able to discover the true meaning of Pāṇini’s clarifying metarule, but it didn’t truly present itself until he let his unconscious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Culture before, there are good reasons we do our best thinking while doing things like walking or taking a shower, a phenomenon that philosophers have broadly recognized through the ages — and, like as not, was understood by the great Pāṇini himself.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Jimi Hendrix Arrives in London in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clapton Away: “You Never Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”
Jimi Hendrix arrived on the London scene like a ton of bricks in 1966, smashing every British blues guitarist to pieces the instant they saw him play. As vocalist Terry Reid tells it, when Hendrix played his first showcase at the Bag O’Nails, arranged by Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler, “there were guitar players weeping. They had to mop the floor up. He was piling it on, solo after solo. I could see everyone’s fillings falling out. When he finished, it was silence. Nobody knew what to do. Everybody was dumbstruck, completely in shock.”
He only exaggerates a little, by all accounts, and when Reid says “everybody,” he means everybody: Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney, The Who, Eric Burdon, John Mayall, and maybe Jimmy Page, though he denies it. Mayall recalls, “the buzz was out before Jimi had even been seen here, so people were anticipating his performance, and he more than lived up to what we were expecting.” In fact, even before this legendary event sent nearly every star classic rock guitarist back to the woodshed, Jimi had arrived unannounced at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and asked to sit in and jam with Cream, where he proceeded to dethrone the reigning British guitar god, Eric Clapton.
Nobody knew who he was, but “in those days anybody could get up with anybody,” Clapton says in a recent interview, “if you were convincing enough that you could play. He got up and blew everyone’s mind.” As Hendrix biographer Charles Cross tells it, “no one had ever asked to jam” with Cream before. “Most would have been too intimidated by their reputation as the best band in Britain.” To hear the story as it’s told in the clip above from the BBC documentary Seven Ages of Rock, no one else would have ever dared to get onstage with Eric Clapton. Clapton, as the famed graffiti in London announced, was God. “It was a very brave person who would do that,” says Jack Bruce.
Actually, it was Chandler who asked the band, and who also tried to prepare Clapton. Jimi got onstage, plugged into Bruce’s bass amp, and played a version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killin’ Floor.” Everyone was “completely gobsmacked,” Clapton writes in his autobiography. “I remember thinking that here was a force to be reckoned with. It scared me, because he was clearly going to be a huge star, and just as we are finding our own speed, here was the real thing.” Fear, envy, awe… all reasonable emotions when standing next to Jimi Hendrix as he tears through “Killin’ Floor” three times faster than anyone else played it (as you can see him play it in Stockholm above)—while doing the splits, lying on the floor, playing with his teeth and behind his head…
“It was amazing,” writes Clapton, “and it was musically great, too, not just pyrotechnics.” There’s no telling how Jimi might have remembered the event had he lived to write his memoirs, but he would have been pretty modest, as was his way. No one else who saw him felt any need to hold back. “It must have been difficult for Eric to handle,” says Bruce, “because [Eric] was ‘God,’” and this unknown person comes along, and burns.” He puts it slightly differently at the top: “Eric was a guitar player. Jimi was some sort of force of nature.”
Rock journalist Keith Altham has yet a third account, as Ed Vulliamy writes at The Guardian. He remembers “Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song ‘which he had yet to master himself’; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: ‘You never told me he was that fucking good.’” Who knows if Hendrix knew Clapton had struggled with “Killin’ Floor” and decided not to try it live. But as blues guitarist Stephen Dale Petit notes, “when Chas invited Jimi to London, Jimi did not ask about money or contracts. He asked if Chas would introduce him to Beck and Clapton.”
He had come to meet, and blow away, his rock heroes. “Two weeks after The Bag O’Nails,” writes Classic Rock’s Johnny Black, “when Cream appeared at The Marquee Club, Clapton was sporting a frizzy perm and he left his guitar feeding back against the amp, just as he’d seen Jimi do.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by Dalí, Magritte, de Chirico & More
Before his signature works like The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Ballard published three apocalyptic novels, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Each of those books offers a different vision of large-scale environmental disaster, and the last even provides a clue as to its inspiration. Or rather, its original cover does, by using a section of Max Ernst’s painting The Eye of Silence. “This spinal landscape, with its frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organic life more real than that of the solitary nymph sitting in the foreground,” Ballard writes in “The Coming of the Unconscious,” an article on surrealism written shortly after The Crystal World appeared in 1966.
First published in an issue of the magazine New Worlds (which also contains Ballard’s take on Chris Marker’s La Jetée), the piece is ostensibly a review of Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism and Marcel Jean’s The History of Surrealist Painting, but it ends up delivering Ballard’s short analyses of a series of paintings by various surrealist masters.
The Eye of Silence shows the landscapes of our world “for what they are — the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living facades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.” The “terrifying structure” at the center of René Magritte’s The Annunciation is “a neuronic totem, its rounded and connected forms are a fragment of our own nervous systems, perhaps an insoluble code that contains the operating formulae for our own passage through time and space.”
In Giorgio de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses, “an undefined anxiety has begun to spread across the deserted square. The symmetry and regularity of the arcades conceals an intense inner violence; this is the face of catatonic withdrawal”; its figures are “human beings from whom all transitional time has been eroded.” Another work depicts an empty beach as “a symbol of utter psychic alienation, of a final stasis of the soul”; its displacement of beach and sea through time “and their marriage with our own four-dimensional continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of our own consciousness.” There Ballard writes of no less familiar a canvas than The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, whom he called “the greatest painter of the twentieth century” more than 40 years after “The Coming of the Unconscious” in the Guardian.
A decade thereafter, that same publication’s Declan Lloyd theorizes that the experimental billboards designed by Ballard in the fifties (previously featured here on Open Culture) had been textual reinterpretations of Dalí’s imagery. Until the late sixties, Ballard says in a 1995 World Art interview, “the Surrealists were very much looked down upon. This was part of their attraction to me, because I certainly didn’t trust English critics, and anything they didn’t like seemed to me probably on the right track. I’m glad to say that my judgment has been seen to be right — and theirs wrong.” He understood the long-term value of Surrealist visions, which had seemingly been obsolesced by World War II before, “all too soon, a new set of nightmares emerged.” We can only hope he won’t be proven as prescient about the long-term habitability of the planet.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Jimi Hendrix Unplugged: Two Great Recordings of Hendrix Playing Acoustic Guitar
As a young guitar player, perhaps no one inspired me as much as Jimi Hendrix, though I never dreamed I’d attain even a fraction of his skill. But what attracted me to him was his near-total lack of formality—he didn’t read music, wasn’t trained in any classical sense, played an upside-down right-handed guitar as a lefty, and fully engaged his head and heart in every note, never pausing for an instant (so it seemed) to second-guess whether it was the right one. I knew his raw emotive playing was firmly rooted in the Delta blues, but it wasn’t until later in my musical journey that I discovered his return to more traditional form after he disbanded The Experience and formed Band of Gypsys with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. While most of the recordings he made with them didn’t see official release, they’ve appeared since his death in compilation after boxset after compilation, including one of the most beloved of Hendrix’s blues songs, “Hear My Train A Comin’.”
Originally titled “Get My Heart Back Together” when he played it at Woodstock in 1969, the song is pure roots, with lyrics that bespeak of both Hendrix’s loneliness and his playful dreams of greatness. (“I’m gonna buy this town / And put it all in my shoe.”) Several versions of the song float around on various posthumous releases—both live and as studio outtakes (including two different takes on the excellent 1994 Blues).
But we have the rare treat, above, of seeing Hendrix play the song on a twelve-string acoustic guitar, Lead Belly’s instrument of choice. The footage comes from the 1973 documentary film Jimi Hendrix (which you can watch on YouTube for $2.99). Hendrix first plays the intro, seated alone in an all-white studio, playing folk-style with the fingers of his left hand. It is, of course, flawless, yet still he stops and asks the filmmakers for a redo. “I was scared to death,” he says, betraying the shyness and self-doubt that lurked beneath his mind-blowing ability and flamboyant persona. His playing is no less perfect when he picks up the tune again and plays it through.
Solo acoustic recordings of Hendrix—film and audio—are incredibly rare. If like me you’re a fan of Hendrix, acoustic blues, or both, this video will make you hunger for more Jimi unplugged. While Hendrix did more than anyone before him to turn guitar amps into instruments with his squalls of electric feedback and distorted wah-wah squeals, when you strip his playing down to basics, he’s still pretty much as good as it gets.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Learn How to Create Your Own Custom AI Assistants Using OpenAI GPTs: A Free Course from Vanderbilt University
Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT–ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs to create logos for their businesses. You get the picture.
If you’re interested in developing your own AI assistant, Vanderbilt computer science professor Jules White has released a free online course called “OpenAI GPTs: Creating Your Own Custom AI Assistants.” On average, the course should take seven hours to complete.
Here’s how he frames the course:
This cutting-edge course will guide you through the exciting journey of creating and deploying custom GPTs that cater to diverse industries and applications. Imagine having a virtual assistant that can tackle complex legal document analysis, streamline supply chain logistics, or even assist in scientific research and hypothesis generation. The possibilities are endless! Throughout the course, you’ll delve into the intricacies of building GPTs that can use your documents to answer questions, patterns to create amazing human and AI interaction, and methods for customizing the tone of your GPTs. You’ll learn how to design and implement rigorous testing scenarios to ensure your AI assistant’s accuracy, reliability, and human-like communication abilities. Prepare to be amazed as you explore real-world examples and case studies, such as:
1. GPT for Personalized Learning and Education: Craft a virtual tutor that adapts its teaching approach based on each student’s learning style, providing personalized lesson plans, interactive exercises, and real-time feedback, transforming the educational landscape.
2. Culinary GPT: Your Personal Recipe Vault and Meal Planning Maestro. Step into a world where your culinary creations come to life with the help of an AI assistant that knows your recipes like the back of its hand. The Culinary GPT is a custom-built language model designed to revolutionize your kitchen experience, serving as a personal recipe vault and meal planning and shopping maestro.
3. GPT for Travel and Business Expense Management: A GPT that can assist with all aspects of travel planning and business expense management. It could help users book flights, hotels, and transportation while adhering to company policies and budgets. Additionally, it could streamline expense reporting and reimbursement processes, ensuring compliance and accuracy.
4. GPT for Marketing and Advertising Campaign Management: Leverage the power of custom GPTs to analyze consumer data, market trends, and campaign performance, generating targeted marketing strategies, personalized messaging, and optimizing ad placement for maximum engagement and return on investment.
You can sign up for the course at no cost here. Or, alternatively, you can elect to pay $49 and receive a certificate at the end.
As a side note, Jules White (the professor) also designed another course previously featured here on OC. It focuses on prompt engineering for ChatPGPT.
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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.
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