Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

in | March 18th, 2012

–From Dan­gling In The Tourne­for­tia (1982)

I still get let­ters in the mail, most­ly from cracked-up
men in tiny rooms with fac­to­ry jobs or no jobs who are
liv­ing with whores or no woman at all, no hope, just
booze and mad­ness.

Most of their let­ters are on lined paper
writ­ten with an unsharp­ened pen­cil
or in ink
in tiny hand­writ­ing that slants to the
left

and the paper is often torn
usu­al­ly halfway up the mid­dle
and they say they like my stuff,
I’ve writ­ten from where it’s at, and
they rec­og­nize that. tru­ly, I’ve giv­en them a sec­ond
chance, some recog­ni­tion of where they’re at.

it’s true, I was there, worse off than most
of them.
but I won­der if they real­ize where their let­ters
arrive?
well, they are dropped into a box
behind a six-foot hedge with a long dri­ve­way lead­ing
to a two car garage, rose gar­den, fruit trees,
ani­mals, a beau­ti­ful woman, mort­gage about half
paid after a year, a new car,
fire­place and a green rug two-inch­es thick
with a young boy to write my stuff now,
I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a
type­writer, feed him whiskey and raw whores,
belt him pret­ty good three or four times
a week.
I’m 59 years old now and the crit­ics say
my stuff is get­ting bet­ter than ever.

“Sweet Home Alabama” Played on Tesla Coils (and More Culture Around the Web)

in Music, Random | March 15th, 2012

You can cre­ate music with Tes­la coils if you know how to mod­u­late their “break rate” with MIDI data and a con­trol unit. Case in point. Here we have two sol­id state musi­cal Tes­la coils, using a com­bined 24KW of pow­er, to play a ver­sion of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 clas­sic “Sweet Home Alaba­ma” (lis­ten to the orig­i­nal here). Also enjoy elec­tri­fied ver­sions of House of The Ris­ing Sun and Duel­ing Ban­jos. via @webacion

More Cul­ture from our Twit­ter Stream:

Jack Ker­ouac’s Only Full-Length Play Will Pre­miere, 55 years After It Was Writ­ten

First MITx Course Attracts 90,000 Stu­dents, Prov­ing the Pop­u­lar­i­ty of Online Learn­ing. Find more Free Cours­es here.

Kurt Von­negut: The Bomb­ing of Dres­den and the Cre­ation of Slaugh­ter­house Five

The Lady Anatomist: The Wax Sculp­tures of 18th-Cen­tu­ry Artist-Sci­en­tist Anna Moran­di Man­zoli­ni

The Ili­ad Visu­al­ized. We Helped Inspire the Project Says the Cre­ator!

Paul Ther­oux Reads The Gospel Accord­ing to Mark by Jorge Luis Borges. Added to our Free Audio Books.

“Mr. Gold­man and Mr. Sachs” Record­ed by @theharryshearer in 2009

Cool Old Sci-Fi Sto­ries for Free on Ama­zon. Tip from @Frauenfelder

Jack Ker­ouac Writes a Let­ter to Mar­lon Bran­do

Sci­en­tists Use Thore­au’s Unpub­lished Jour­nals to Track Cli­mate Change

Clas­sic Sci­ence Fic­tion Movies – in Pic­tures

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

in Books, History, Politics | March 9th, 2012

George Orwell occu­pies a fun­ny place in the mod­ern lit­er­ary con­scious­ness. The last few gen­er­a­tions came to know him, in Eng­lish class, as the author of the nov­els Ani­mal Farm and Nine­teen Eighty-Four. My own peers may remem­ber their teach­ers’ awk­ward inver­sion of the ear­li­er book, forced as they were to clar­i­fy Orwell’s already direct Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion alle­go­ry by explain­ing that, a long time ago, there lived a man named Trot­sky who was a lot like Snow­ball the pig, and so on. The lat­er book, many read­ers’ first glimpse at a real­is­tic dystopia, tends to hit us hard­er. All those tin­ny, piped-in patri­ot­ic anthems; the vari­cose veins; the saw­dusty cig­a­rettes; the defeat­ed cups of watery tea — why on Earth, we asked our­selves, did Orwell so con­fi­dent­ly fore­see a sham­bol­ic world of such simul­ta­ne­ous chintzi­ness and bru­tal­i­ty?

Apart from his six nov­els and four vol­umes of mem­oir, Orwell pro­duced an aston­ish­ing quan­ti­ty of essays. These I reg­u­lar­ly con­sult in my brick-like Everyman’s Library edi­tion, and I bought that on the strength of two par­tic­u­lar pieces: “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage” and “Why I Write.” Many of us encounter these here or there in the course of high­er edu­ca­tion, and none of us with an inter­est in read­ing, writ­ing, think­ing, and the feed­back loop between the three for­get them. Pres­sured to cite the most inci­sive pas­sage in all of Orwell, how could I decide between the for­mer essay’s descrip­tion of how “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blur­ring the out­line and cov­er­ing up all the details,” and the lat­ter essay’s con­trast of the writer’s ego against that of “the great mass of human beings” who, after thir­ty, “almost aban­don the sense of being indi­vid­u­als at all — and live chiefly for oth­ers, or are sim­ply smoth­ered under drudgery”?

Despite pass­ing at only 46, Orwell left an almost impos­ing­ly large body of writ­ten work. Read­ers who’ve savored it and want to learn, hear, and see more come up against a cer­tain dif­fi­cul­ty: we have a few pho­tographs of Orwell, but as far as sound or film, noth­ing exists. Yet that didn’t stop BBC Four from putting togeth­er George Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, cast­ing actor Chris Lang­ham as Orwell, hav­ing him speak Orwell’s words, and insert­ing him, Zelig-like, into his­tor­i­cal footage real and recon­struct­ed of Orwell’s places and times. Doc­u­men­tary purists may balk at this, but strong choic­es make strong films. As a com­pul­sive read­er of Orwell myself, I’ll take any chance I can to expe­ri­ence more rich­ly the mind of this child of the “low­er upper-mid­dle class” whose fas­ci­na­tion with pover­ty drove him down into it; this social­ist who loathed both the trap­pings and pro­po­nents of social­ism; this wor­shiper of hard man­u­al labor who under­stood more about the impact of words than most of us do today; this famed writer who cloaked his giv­en name of Eric Arthur Blair to bet­ter retreat, alone, into his gray, qua­si-ascetic Eng­lish plea­sures.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Five Free Courses from Stanford Start This Month

in Online Courses, Stanford | March 6th, 2012

Stan­ford’s big open course ini­tia­tive keeps rolling along. On March 12, three new cours­es will get under­way:

• Design and Analy­sis of Algo­rithms
• Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing
• Cryp­tog­ra­phy

Then, start­ing on March 19, two more will take flight:

• Game The­o­ry
• Prob­a­bilis­tic Graph­i­cal Mod­els

The cours­es gen­er­al­ly fea­ture inter­ac­tive video clips; short quizzes that pro­vide instant feed­back; the abil­i­ty to pose high val­ue ques­tions to Stan­ford instruc­tors; feed­back on your over­all per­for­mance in the class; and a state­ment of accom­plish­ment at the end of the course.

And, yes, the cours­es are free and now open for enroll­ment.

As always, don’t miss our big list of 425 Free Online Cours­es. It may just be the sin­gle most awe­some page on the web.

Sto­ry via Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty News. Algo­rithm image cour­tesy of Big­Stock.

David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)

in Books, Politics, Television | February 20th, 2012

In 2003, an inter­view­er from Ger­man pub­lic tele­vi­sion sta­tion ZDF sat down with nov­el­ist David Fos­ter Wal­lace in a hotel room. The ensu­ing con­ver­sa­tion, whose raw, unedit­ed 84 min­utes (find links to the com­plete inter­view below) made it to the inter­net after Wal­lace’s sui­cide, remains the most direct, expan­sive, and dis­arm­ing­ly rough-hewn media treat­ment of his themes, his per­son­al­i­ty, and the fas­ci­nat­ing (if at times chill­ing) feed­back loop between them.

You can also expe­ri­ence this con­ver­sa­tion in short, the­mat­i­cal­ly orga­nized clips; above, we have “David Fos­ter Wal­lace on Polit­i­cal Think­ing in Amer­i­ca.” Wal­lace express­es his con­cerns about the strong influ­ence of tele­vi­sion ads on elec­tions, which means, he says, “we get can­di­dates who are behold­en to large donors and become, in some ways, cor­rupt, which dis­gusts the vot­ers, makes them even less inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, less will­ing to read and do the work of cit­i­zen­ship.” This he sees cou­pled with an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mar­ket­ing cul­ture which stokes “that feel­ing of hav­ing to obey every impulse and grat­i­fy every desire” — “a strange kind of slav­ery.”

But as his pained, self-ques­tion­ing expres­sion reveals — espe­cial­ly when it retreats into strange­ly endear­ing post-answer cringes — Wal­lace did not believe he pos­sessed the cure for, or even a pre­cise­ly accu­rate diag­no­sis of, a sick soci­ety. Offer­ing social crit­i­cism at a vast remove from the avun­cu­lar con­dem­na­tion of a Noam Chom­sky or the raised mid­dle fin­ger of a Bill Hicks, Wal­lace dis­cuss­es his fears through a nov­el­ist’s con­scious­ness that longs to, as he explains the desire else­where in the inter­view, “jump over the wall of self and inhab­it some­one else.” When the inter­view­er tells him about her peers’ frus­tra­tion at feel­ing edu­cat­ed but “not being able to do any­thing with it,” Wal­lace puts him­self in the mind of stu­dents who go from study­ing “the lib­er­al arts: phi­los­o­phy, clas­si­cal stuff, lan­guages, all very much about the nobil­i­ty of the human spir­it and broad­en­ing the mind” to “a spe­cial­ized school to learn how to sue peo­ple or to fig­ure out how to write copy that will make peo­ple buy a cer­tain kind of SUV” to “jobs that are finan­cial­ly reward­ing, but don’t have any­thing to do with what they got taught — and per­sua­sive­ly taught — was impor­tant and worth­while.”

Under­neath Wal­lace’s respons­es rush­es a cur­rent of the ques­tions his writ­ing leads read­ers to think — and think hard — about: How far has enter­tain­ment evolved toward pure anes­thet­ic? Can we still sep­a­rate our needs from our wants, if we try? Has post-Gen X irony made us not just col­lec­tive­ly inef­fec­tu­al but that much eas­i­er to sell things to? Can we ever again use terms like “cit­i­zen­ship” with­out instinc­tive­ly sneer­ing at our­selves? To the David Fos­ter Wal­lace novice, these clips make for a help­ful the­mat­ic primer, but the full record­ing (see below) will there­after become required view­ing. The inter­view brims with the kind of asides that make it feel like a page from the note­book of one of Wal­lace’s own favorite lit­er­ary crafts­men, Jorge Luis Borges. Wal­lace won­ders aloud how much of what he says will get edit­ed out, if he can dis­cuss his all-con­sum­ing sus­pi­cion that “there’s some­thing real­ly good on anoth­er chan­nel and I’m miss­ing it” while he’s actu­al­ly on tele­vi­sion, and how to talk to the media about how dif­fi­cult it is to talk to the media while pre­tend­ing you don’t know you’re talk­ing to the media. As he admits after unpack­ing one par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult issue, “It’s all… com­pli­cat­ed.”

The com­plete inter­view can be viewed up top.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Name That Movie: 26 Films in One Animated Minute

in Animation, Film | February 17th, 2012

Evan Seitz cre­at­ed this one-minute ani­ma­tion in which each let­ter of the alpha­bet rep­re­sents a famous movie. How many can you name? The answers have been shared on Buz­zfeed and The High Def­i­nite.

Don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Movies Online, which includes many great clas­sics, indies, doc­u­men­taries, noir films and more.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

Before Brokeback: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cinema (1927)

in Film | January 26th, 2012

Brain­Pick­ings recent­ly high­light­ed the first kiss in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. That takes you back to 1896, to a film brought to you by Thomas Edi­son. Now we rewind the video­tape and present the first same-sex kiss in film his­to­ry (or at least one of the ear­li­est known ones). This Broke­back-before-Broke­back moment took place in the 1927 film Wings — the first and only silent film to win the Acad­e­my Award for Best Pic­ture. Bud­dy Rogers and Richard Arlen star in the film, play­ing two com­bat pilots who vie for the affec­tion of the same woman (Clara Bow). That’s the sto­ry­line. But nei­ther, as writer Kevin Ses­sums writes, “shows as much love for her … as they do for each oth­er.”

Find more clas­sics in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Andrew Sul­li­van

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Nine PAC Ads from Stephen Colbert Spoof U.S. Election System

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Politics | January 24th, 2012

When the Supreme Court, in its infi­nite wis­dom, decid­ed that cor­po­ra­tions enjoy the free speech rights of indi­vid­u­als, it took a bad cam­paign finance sys­tem and made it worse. Sud­den­ly, free-spend­ing PACs, rep­re­sent­ing pow­er­ful busi­ness inter­ests, could flood our cam­paign finance sys­tem with unprece­dent­ed amounts of mon­ey and dis­tort the way we elect lead­ers in the Unit­ed States. In the ear­ly days of the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion process, we’re already see­ing the results. Super PACs, some­times receiv­ing $5 mil­lion from one indi­vid­ual, are run­ning attack ads — lots of attack ads — in pri­ma­ry states. And the real del­uge has yet to come. Just wait until next fall.

What to do about the sanc­tioned dis­tor­tion of our polit­i­cal sys­tem? It’s hard to be opti­mistic when fix­ing the prob­lem would real­is­ti­cal­ly require a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment. But that’s what Lawrence Lessig (Har­vard law pro­fes­sor and founder of Cre­ative Com­mons) is try­ing to do. Appear­ing at Google (see below), Lessig describes how spe­cial inter­ests cor­rupt our polit­i­cal sys­tem, and what we can do to stop it. But even Lessig will admit that it’s an uphill bat­tle.

That leaves us with the next best solu­tion: turn a joke of an elec­tion sys­tem into a good joke. Enter Stephen Col­bert. The come­di­an has cre­at­ed his own Super PAC (run by Jon Stew­art) that comes com­plete with its own TV ads. The par­o­dy above — an attack ad on attack ads — makes its point pret­ty effec­tive­ly. You can watch eight more Col­bert PAC com­mer­cials here, and make a dona­tion to his PAC here. And, if you’re feel­ing gen­er­ous, you can show your sup­port for Open Cul­ture here.

Break­ing News: Stephen Col­bert ends qua­si-pres­i­den­tial cam­paign

How Film Was Made in 1958: A Kodak Nostalgia Moment

in History, Photography | January 18th, 2012

Before pix­els there were sil­ver halide crys­tals, and before mem­o­ry cards, film. Lit­tle yel­low box­es clut­tered the lives of pho­tog­ra­phers every­where, and the East­man Kodak Com­pa­ny was vir­tu­al­ly syn­ony­mous with pho­tog­ra­phy.

Things have real­ly changed. With the recent news that Kodak is tee­ter­ing on the brink of Chap­ter 11 bank­rupt­cy, many are feel­ing nos­tal­gia for those lit­tle yel­low box­es and the rolls of sil­ver gelatin film inside. To indulge this nostalgia–and per­haps learn some­thing new about an old technology–we offer a fas­ci­nat­ing 1958 doc­u­men­tary from Kodak enti­tled How Film is Made.

The doc­u­men­tary is in Dutch, but mem­bers of the Ana­log Pho­tog­ra­phy Users Group launched a project to cre­ate Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. You can read more about the project on Dutch mem­ber Mar­co Boeringa’s web­site. And you can watch the 18-minute film start­ing above and con­clud­ing below.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials

in Film, Television | January 10th, 2012

Last month we brought you some lit­tle-known soap com­mer­cials by Ing­mar Bergman. Today we present a series of lyri­cal tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments made by the great Ital­ian film­mak­er Fed­eri­co Felli­ni dur­ing the final decade of his life.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Felli­ni agreed to make a minia­ture film fea­tur­ing Cam­pari, the famous Ital­ian apéri­tif. The result, Oh, che bel pae­sag­gio! (“Oh, what a beau­ti­ful land­scape!”), shown above, fea­tures a man and a woman seat­ed across from one anoth­er on a long-dis­tance train.

The man (played by Vic­tor Polet­ti) smiles, but the woman (Sil­via Dion­i­sio) averts her eyes, star­ing sul­len­ly out the win­dow and pick­ing up a remote con­trol to switch the scenery. She grows increas­ing­ly exas­per­at­ed as a sequence of desert and medieval land­scapes pass by. Still smil­ing, the man takes the remote con­trol, clicks it, and the beau­ti­ful Cam­po di Mira­coli (“Field of Mir­a­cles”) of Pisa appears in the win­dow, embell­ished by a tow­er­ing bot­tle of Cam­pari.

“In just one minute,” writes Tul­lio Kezich in Fed­eri­co Felli­ni: His Life and Work, “Felli­ni gives us a chap­ter of the sto­ry of the bat­tle between men and women, and makes ref­er­ence to the neu­ro­sis of TV, insin­u­ates that we’re dis­parag­ing the mirac­u­lous gifts of nature and his­to­ry, and offers the hope that there might be a screen that will bring the joy back. The lit­tle tale is as quick as a train and has a remark­ably light touch.”

Also in 1984, Felli­ni made a com­mer­cial titled Alta Soci­eta (“High Soci­ety”) for Bar­il­la riga­toni pas­ta (above). As with the Cam­pari com­mer­cial, Felli­ni wrote the script him­self and col­lab­o­rat­ed with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ennio Guarnieri and musi­cal direc­tor Nico­la Pio­vani. The cou­ple in the restau­rant were played by Gre­ta Vaian and Mau­r­izio Mau­ri. The Bar­il­la spot is per­haps the least inspired of Fellini’s com­mer­cials. Bet­ter things were yet to come.

In 1991 Felli­ni made a series of three com­mer­cials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Not­ti or “The Bad Nights.” “These com­mer­cials, aired the fol­low­ing year,” writes Peter Bon­danel­la in The Films of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, “are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, since they find their inspi­ra­tion in var­i­ous dreams Felli­ni had sketched out in his dream note­books dur­ing his career.”

In the episode above, titled “The Pic­nic Lunch Dream,” the clas­sic damsel-in-dis­tress sce­nario is turned upside down when a man (played by Pao­lo Vil­lag­gio) finds him­self trapped on the rail­road tracks with a train bear­ing down on him while the beau­ti­ful woman he was din­ing with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psy­cho­an­a­lyst (Fer­nan­do Rey). The ana­lyst inter­prets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be rest­ful if he puts his mon­ey in the Ban­co di Roma.

The oth­er com­mer­cials, which are cur­rent­ly not avail­able online, are called “The Tun­nel Dream” and “The Dream of the Lion in the Cel­lar.” (You can watch Rober­to Di Vito’s short, untrans­lat­ed film of Felli­ni and his crew work­ing on the project here.)

The bank com­mer­cials were the last films Felli­ni ever made. He died a year after they aired, at age 73. In Kezich’s view, the deeply per­son­al and imag­i­na­tive ads amount to Fellini’s last tes­ta­ment, a brief but won­drous return to form. “In Fed­eri­co’s life,” he writes, “these three com­mer­cial spots are a kind of Indi­an sum­mer, the gold­en autumn of a patri­arch of cin­e­ma who, for a moment, holds again the reins of cre­ation.”

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.