David Lynch’s “Crazy Clown Time,” Stream the New Album

in Film, Music | November 3rd, 2011

A quick fyi: We pre­viewed the title track a few weeks back. Now, you can stream the full album for free, cour­tesy of NPR. But don’t delay, the free tracks will only linger for a lim­it­ed time.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

David Lynch’s Organ­ic Cof­fee (Bar­bie Head Not Includ­ed)

David Lynch on his Favorite Movies and Film­mak­ers

How Much Does The Entire, Big Internet Weigh?

in Random, Technology | November 3rd, 2011

5 mil­lion ter­abytes of infor­ma­tion. That’s what you get when you bun­dle up all of the emails, videos, pho­tos, web sites and sundry mate­ri­als avail­able on the web. Now here’s the big ques­tion: how much does all of that infor­ma­tion weigh? No spoil­ers here. We’ll let the folks at VSauce give you the answer.

PS The 5 mil­lion ter­abytes fig­ure was giv­en by Eric Schmidt in 2005. So the fig­ure is a bit dat­ed, but it does­n’t take away from the gist of the exer­cise…

Kim Kardashian Gets Divorced; Salman Rushdie Writes Limerick

in Literature, Poetry, Television | November 3rd, 2011

Per­haps you know the back­sto­ry; per­haps you don’t. This week, socialite and real­i­ty “star” Kim Kar­dashi­an announced that her 72-day mar­riage to Kris Humphries will end in divorce. In response, the tabloids buzzed … and famed author Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Chil­dren, The Satan­ic Vers­es and The Moor’s Last Sigh) took to Twit­ter and offered up a nice lit­tle lim­er­ick. It starts with the blue sec­tion and moves up the page…

Fol­low the author at @SalmanRushdie, and us at @openculture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Salman Rushdie on Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Jim Jarmusch: The Art of the Music in His Films

in Film, Music | November 2nd, 2011

In the ear­ly 1980s, aspir­ing film­mak­er Jim Jar­musch immersed him­self in New York’s under­ground music scene. He played keyboards–a “fair­ly prim­i­tive Moog synthesizer”–in places like CBGB and the Mudd Club with a No Wave band called The Del-Byzan­teens and was deeply influ­enced by the spir­it of punk rock. “The aes­thet­ics of that scene real­ly gave me the courage to make films,” Jar­musch lat­er recalled. “It was not about vir­tu­os­i­ty. It was about expres­sion.”

Over the years, Jar­musch cast musi­cians instead of actors in many of his films: Joe Strum­mer, Tom Waits, John Lurie, Iggy Pop–all had some­thing in com­mon. Each had stood up against com­mer­cial pres­sure from the main­stream pop­u­lar cul­ture. Jar­musch car­ried the same uncom­pro­mis­ing spir­it into the cre­ation of his films.

In the dis­cus­sion above, record­ed some­time after the release of 1999’s Ghost Dog, Jar­musch explains his approach to using music in film.

The open­ing sequence of Jar­musch’s 1986 film Down by Law (above) rolls to the groove of Tom Wait­s’s “Jock­ey Full of Bour­bon,” from the clas­sic Rain Dogs album. Waits him­self plays a lead­ing role in the film. His music fits per­fect­ly into the atmos­phere of the sto­ry, writes Juan A. Suárez in his crit­i­cal study, Jim Jar­musch: “Wait­s’s songs tell of frac­tured romances set in an under­world of drifters, pimps, and prostitutes–to a large extent the milieu of the film. And both Jar­musch’s film and Wait­s’s songs recy­cle retro idioms. The visu­al style of Down by Law draws from a num­ber of 1940s and 1950s stu­dio gen­res, while Wait­s’s songs are replete with pas­tich­es of pol­ka, waltz, clas­sic blues, and Caribbean rhythms.”

For the sur­re­al 1995 west­ern Dead Man (sam­pled in the mon­tage above) Jar­musch enlist­ed Neil Young to com­pose and per­form the sound­track. “To me,” Young is quot­ed as say­ing at the out­set of the project by Jonathan Rosen­baum in his BFI Mod­ern Clas­sics book on the film, “the movie is my rhythm sec­tion and I will add a melody to that.” Young record­ed his min­i­mal­ist score, much of it impro­vised, in a large ware­house in San Fran­cis­co while watch­ing a rough cut of the film. Young played all the instru­ments: elec­tric and acoustic gui­tars, pump organ and a detuned piano.

The oth­er-world­ly, some­times jar­ring music baf­fled a few of the crit­ics. “A mood might have devel­oped here,” wrote Roger Ebert in a scathing review, “had it not been for the unfor­tu­nate score by Neil Young, which for the film’s final 30 min­utes sounds like noth­ing so much as a man repeat­ed­ly drop­ping his gui­tar.” Oth­ers heard genius. Rock his­to­ri­an Greil Mar­cus, in his “Ten rea­sons why Neil Young’s “Dead Man” is the best music for the dog days of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” wrote: “The music, as you lis­ten, sep­a­rates from the movie even as it frames scenes, ban­ter, recitals. It gets big­ger and more abstract, and it becomes hard to under­stand how any film, show­ing peo­ple doing this or that in spe­cif­ic, non-abstract ways, could hold it.”

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

New Jim Jar­musch Doc­u­men­tary on Iggy Pop & The Stooges Now Stream­ing Free on Ama­zon Prime

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talk­ing Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dyna­mite

Joan Didion Reads From New Memoir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Directed by Griffin Dunne

in Books, Life, Literature | November 2nd, 2011

A mere twen­ty months after Joan Did­ion’s hus­band, John Gre­go­ry Dunne, died of a heart attack, Did­ion’s only child, Quin­tana Roo Dunne, con­tract­ed pneu­mo­nia, lapsed into sep­tic shock and passed away. She was only 39 years old. Did­ion grap­pled with the first death in her 2005 best­seller, The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing. Now, with her new mem­oir Blue Nights, she turns to her child’s pass­ing, to a par­en­t’s worst fear real­ized. In this short film shot by her nephew, direc­tor Grif­fin Dunne, Did­ion reads from Blue Nights. The scene opens with mem­o­ries from her daugh­ter’s wed­ding and ends with some big exis­ten­tial ques­tions and the refrain, “When we talk about mor­tal­i­ty we are talk­ing about our chil­dren.”

This “audio­book for the eyes,” as Grif­fin Dunne calls it, runs six plus min­utes. The actu­al Blue Nights audio book is now avail­able on Audi­ble.

A big thanks goes to @opedr for send­ing the Did­ion clip our way…

Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston

in Current Affairs, Politics | November 1st, 2011

Noam Chom­sky joined the fac­ul­ty of MIT in 1955, and, soon enough estab­lished him­self as “the father of mod­ern lin­guis­tics.” (Watch him debate Michel Fou­cault in 1971.) Dur­ing the 60s, he also firm­ly posi­tioned him­self as a lead­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al tak­ing aim at Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy and glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, and we reg­u­lar­ly saw him engag­ing with fig­ures like William F. Buck­ley.

All of these years lat­er, it’s quite fit­ting that Chom­sky, now 82 years old, would pay a vis­it to Occu­py Boston and deliv­er a talk in the Howard Zinn Memo­r­i­al Lec­ture Series. Why has our polit­i­cal sys­tem become more respon­sive to cor­po­ra­tions than cit­i­zens? How has wealth become increas­ing­ly con­cen­trat­ed in the hands of an ever small­er elite — a plu­toc­ra­cy, to put it sim­ply? And why do bil­lion­aire hedge fund man­agers enjoy a low­er tax rate than maligned school teach­ers and pret­ty much every­one else? Chom­sky explains how we got to this point, and what’s to be done about it. Find his talk in three parts: Part 1 (above), Part 2 and Part 3.  via Dan­ger­ous Minds.

More Occu­py Videos:

Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occu­py Wall Street

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

Hans Rosling Uses Ikea Props to Explain World of 7 Billion People

in Current Affairs | November 1st, 2011

Accord­ing to Unit­ed Nations demog­ra­phers, the world’s pop­u­la­tion like­ly topped 7 bil­lion on Mon­day, and we’ll now steam for­ward, hit­ting 9.3 bil­lion by 2050. 7 bil­lion is a news­wor­thy mile­stone, to be sure. But what does this num­ber real­ly mean? To put things in per­spec­tive, we’re fea­tur­ing a recent TED Talk by Hans Rosling, a pro­fes­sor of glob­al health who presents data in imag­i­na­tive ways. His pre­sen­ta­tions can get wild­ly dig­i­tal. (Just watch 200 Coun­tries & 200 Years in 4 Min­utes). But not so in this case. The props are sim­ple goods bought at IKEA, and they do more than an ade­quate job explain­ing the past, present and future of glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth.

Filmmaking Advice from Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi (NSFW)

in Film | October 31st, 2011

At Com­ic-Con 2009, some aspir­ing film­mak­ers had the chance to ask real-deal direc­tors how to make it in the busi­ness. Sam Rai­mi offered some very tan­gi­ble and prac­ti­cal advice — advice that prob­a­bly any young direc­tor should take to heart. Then Quentin Taran­ti­no fol­lowed up with some col­or­ful rec­om­men­da­tions (at the 2:20 mark) that may be more inspirational/aspirational than achiev­able. Robert Rodriguez and Guiller­mo del Toro also offer their thoughts.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Taran­ti­no’s Favorite Films Since 1992

Crack­ing Taran­ti­no (Award-win­ning Film From Brazil)

John Irv­ing: The Road Ahead for Aspir­ing Nov­el­ists

Names of Paris Métro Stops Acted Out: Photos by Janol Apin

in Random | October 30th, 2011

A lit­tle fun for any­one who has spent time on the Paris Métro, which car­ries mil­lions of pas­sen­gers through 301 often art­ful­ly-named stops each day. Shot dur­ing the 1990s by Janol Apin, this col­lec­tion of pho­tos takes the names of real sta­tions and acts them out in imag­i­na­tive ways. Enjoy the rest here. H/T @MatthiasRascher

Fol­low us on Face­book and Twit­ter and we’ll keep point­ing you to free cul­tur­al good­ies dai­ly…

Bertrand Russell Explains How Smoking Paradoxically Saved His Life

in Life, Philosophy | October 28th, 2011

In 1959, Bertrand Rus­sell, then push­ing 90, could still give a good inter­view. We have pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured vin­tage video of Rus­sell send­ing a mes­sage to peo­ple liv­ing 1,000 years in the future and also con­tem­plat­ing the exis­tence/non-exis­tence of God. Now comes more footage from ’59, and this time he tells us all about how smok­ing a pipe saved his life. It makes for a good anec­dote (get more on his near-death expe­ri­ence here), though not an endorse­ment for tak­ing up the habit.…

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing in a Healthy Democ­ra­cy

Bertrand Rus­sell & Oth­er Big Thinkers in BBC Lec­ture Series (Free)

Down­load Free Cours­es from Famous Philoso­phers: From Bertrand Rus­sell to Michel Fou­cault

Bertrand Rus­sell Lists His 20 Favorite Words in 1958 (and What Are Some of Yours?)