Every Poem in Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” Set to Music, Illustrated and Performed Live

in Literature, Music, Poetry, Theatre | May 8th, 2017

Charles Baude­laire must be a joy­ful corpse indeed. His work has suc­ceed­ed as few oth­ers’ have, to be so pas­sion­ate­ly alive 150 years after his death.

The­ater Oobleck, a Chica­go artis­tic col­lec­tive ded­i­cat­ed to cre­at­ing orig­i­nal afford­able the­atri­cal works, has spent the last eleven years assem­bling Baude­laire in a Box, a can­tas­to­ria cycle based on Les Fleurs du Mal.

Why?

Because he would be so irri­tat­ed. Because he might be charmed

There is a touch of vaude­ville and cabaret in Baude­laire. He tend­ed to go big or go home. Home to his moth­er.

Because he invent­ed the term “moder­ni­ty” and even now no one quite knows what it means. Because he wrote a poet­ry of immer­sion per­fect­ly suit­ed to the tran­sience and Now-ness of song and of the Ever-Mov­ing scroll. Because we nev­er had a prop­er goth phase. Sex and death! For all these rea­sons, and for the true one that remains just out of our grasp.

Each new install­ment fea­tures a line-up of musi­cians per­form­ing live adap­ta­tions of anoth­er 10 to 15 poems, as artist Dave Buchen’s paint­ed illus­tra­tions slow­ly spool past on hand-turned “crankies.”

The result­ing “pro­to music videos” are volup­tuous­ly inti­mate affairs, with plen­ty of time to reflect upon the orig­i­nal texts’ explic­it sex­u­al­i­ty, the gor­geous urban decay that so pre­oc­cu­pied one of Roman­tic poetry’s naugh­ti­est boys.

The instru­ments and musi­cal palate—klezmer, alt-coun­try, antifolk—are befit­ting of the inter­preters’ well honed down­town sen­si­bil­i­ties. The lyrics are drunk on their dark imagery.

The entire project makes for the sort of extrav­a­gant­ly eccen­tric night out that might lead a young poet to lean close to his blind date, mid-show, to whis­per “Wouldn’t it be agree­able to take a bath with me?” No word on whether that line worked for the poéte mau­dit, who report­ed­ly issued such an invi­ta­tion to a friend mid-sen­tence.

This August, The­ater Oobleck intends to observe the sesqui­cen­ten­ni­al of Baudelaire’s death in grand style with a marathon per­for­mance of the com­plete Baude­laire in a Box, a three-day effort involv­ing 50 artists and over 130 poems.

Allow a few past exam­ples to set the mood:

The Offend­ed Moon From Episode 9 of Baude­laire In A Box, “Unquenched.” Com­posed and trans­lat­ed by David Costan­za. Emmy Bean: vocal, Ron­nie Kuller: accor­dion, T‑Roy Mar­tin trom­bone, David E. Smith: clar­inet, Chris Schoen: vocal, Joey Spilberg: bass.

The Denial of St. Peter Com­posed, trans­lat­ed and per­formed by Sad Brad Smith, with Emmy Bean (hand per­cus­sion), Ron­nie Kuller (accor­dion), T‑Roy Mar­tin (trom­bone), Chris Schoen (man­dolin), and Joey Spilberg (bass).

The Drag Music com­posed by Ron­nie Kuller, to Mick­le Maher’s trans­la­tion of “L’Aver­tis­seur” by Charles Baude­laire. Per­formed by: Emmy Bean (vocal, per­cus­sion), Angela James (vocal), Ron­nie Kuller (piano, per­cus­sion), T‑Roy Mar­tin (vocal), Chris Schoen (vocal), David E. Smith (sax­o­phone), and Joey Spilberg (bass).

The Hard(-est) Work­ing Skele­ton Music by Amy War­ren, Per­formed by Nora O’Con­nor, with Addie Horan, Amalea Tshilds, Kate Dou­glas, James Beck­er and Ted Day.

The Pos­sessed Writ­ten and per­formed by Jeff Dorchen.

You can lis­ten to and pur­chase songs from Episodes 7 (the King of Rain) and 9 (Unquenched) on Band­camp.

Some of the par­tic­i­pat­ing musi­cians have released their own albums fea­tur­ing tracks of their Baude­laire-based tunes.

The­ater Oobleck is rais­ing funds for the upcom­ing Closed Cas­ket: The Com­plete, Final, and Absolute­ly Last Baude­laire in a Box on Kick­starter, with music and prints and orig­i­nals of Buchen’s work among the pre­mi­ums at var­i­ous pledge lev­els.

All images used with per­mis­sion of artist Dave Buchen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Great 19 Cen­tu­ry Poems Read in French: Baude­laire, Rim­baud, Ver­laine & More

Baude­laire, Balzac, Dumas, Delacroix & Hugo Get a Lit­tle Baked at Their Hash Club (1844–1849)

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She will be appear­ing in a live excerpt from CB Goodman’s How to Kill an Ele­phant this Fri­day at Dixon Place in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The MoMA Teaches You How to Paint Like Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning & Other Abstract Painters

in Art, MOOCs | May 8th, 2017

Some may find her insuf­fer­able, but most read­ers adore her: the insou­ciant lit­tle pig Olivia—New York­er, art lover, and Calde­cott Medal winner—has for­ev­er embed­ded her­self in children’s lit­er­ary cul­ture as an arche­type of child­hood curios­i­ty and self-con­fi­dence, espe­cial­ly in scenes like that of the first book of the series, in which the fear­less piglet pro­duces her own drip paint­ing on the wall of the family’s Upper East Side apart­ment after puz­zling over Jack­son Pollock’s work at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. (Olivia also admires Degas, aspires to the bal­let, and dreams of being Maria Callas.)

Olivia’s head­strong chal­lenge to Pol­lock is infec­tious, and enacts a notion com­mon among ama­teur view­ers of Abstract Expres­sion­ism—“I could do that.” Her “Jack­son Piglet Wall Paint­ing” fea­tures in a book that gives chil­dren their own set of instruc­tions for mak­ing a pseu­do-Pol­lock (on paper, of course). As you will see, how­ev­er, in the video above—a guide for grown-ups who may wish to do the same—Pollock’s process is not so eas­i­ly dupli­cat­ed, and can­not be done on the wall. As the Ed Har­ris-star­ring biopic dra­ma­tized, Pol­lock made his huge can­vass­es on the floor—drawing the lines and ges­tur­al fig­ures in the air rather than on the can­vas.

In these videos from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s upcom­ing free online course on Post­war paint­ing, edu­ca­tor and inde­pen­dent con­ser­va­tor Corey D’Augustine demon­strates that, we can, with some degree of sta­mi­na and ath­leti­cism, approx­i­mate Pollock’s tech­nique. We can­not, how­ev­er, recre­ate his tem­pera­ment and emo­tion­al state. And, as view­ers of the film based on his life will know, we would not want to. Pol­lock was a vio­lent­ly abu­sive, depres­sive alco­holic, and while there may be no nec­es­sary rela­tion to cre­ativ­i­ty and suf­fer­ing, New York Abstract Expres­sion­ists seemed to wrest the inten­si­ty of their work from wells of per­son­al pain.

It is no won­der that the longest video in D’Augustine’s series cov­ers the meth­ods of Agnes Mar­tin. The enig­mat­ic Mar­tin used her work as a dis­ci­pline that took her beyond despair and defeat. Like Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beck­ett, she insist­ed that art, though a form of self-expres­sion, must emerge imper­son­al­ly, such that the artist “can take no cred­it for its sud­den appear­ance.” On the oth­er side of failure—she told her audi­ence in a poignant and pow­er­ful 1973 speech called “On the Per­fec­tion Under­ly­ing Life”—“we still go on with­out hope or desire or dreams or any­thing. Just going on with almost no mem­o­ry of hav­ing done any­thing.”

The atti­tude, Mar­tin said, is a dis­ci­pline, the dis­ci­pline of art—one that saw her through a life­long strug­gle with schiz­o­phre­nia. Inspired by Tao­ism and Zen Bud­dhism, Martin’s “lumi­nous, silent” paint­ings are stud­ies in patience and delib­er­a­tion. We see a very dif­fer­ent tech­nique in the ges­tur­al paint­ing of Willem de Koon­ing—anoth­er Abstract Expres­sion­ist with a seri­ous drink­ing prob­lem. Do these bio­graph­i­cal issues mat­ter? While it may do Martin’s work a dis­ser­vice to reduce it to “the prod­ucts of a per­son com­pelled by men­tal ill­ness,” as Zoe Pil­ger writes at The Inde­pen­dent, de Koon­ing’s even­tu­al sobri­ety led to a “dra­mat­ic shift,” Susan Cheev­er notes, “in the way he saw and paint­ed the world in his last decade or so.”

We need not psy­chol­o­gize the work of any of these artists, includ­ing that of the bipo­lar Mark Rothko, above, to learn from their tech­niques. And yet it remains the case that—even were we to dupli­cate Pol­lock, Mar­tin, de Koon­ing, or Rothko on can­vas, we would nev­er be able to imbue it with their pecu­liar per­son­al­i­ties, pains, and move­ments, with the depth and inten­si­ty each artist brought to their work. Great art does not require suf­fer­ing, but many artists have poured their suf­fer­ing into art that only they could make.

But mim­ic­ry is not the goal of MoMA’s class. Instead “In the Stu­dio: Post­war Abstract Paint­ing” intends to give stu­dents “a deep­er under­stand­ing of what a stu­dio prac­tice means and how ideas devel­op from close look­ing. They’ll also “gain a sen­si­tiv­i­ty to the phys­i­cal qual­i­ties of paint,” a key fea­ture of this mate­r­i­al and tex­ture-obsessed group, and the course will exam­ine the “broad­er cul­tur­al, intel­lec­tu­al, and his­tor­i­cal con­text about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active.”

The eight-week course cov­ers sev­en artists, includ­ing those above and Ad Rein­hardt, Yay­oi Kusama, and Bar­nett New­man. Stu­dents are free to do quizzes and writ­ten assign­ments only, or to par­tic­i­pate in the option­al stu­dio exer­cis­es, pro­vid­ed they have the space and the mate­ri­als. (For those stu­dio prac­ti­tion­ers, D’Augustine offers brief tuto­ri­als on tools like the palette knife and mate­ri­als like stains.) Watch the trail­er for D’Augustine’s course above. Like the irre­press­ible Olivia, stu­dents will be encour­aged “to exper­i­ment quite wild­ly” with what they might learn.

“In the Stu­dio: Post­war Abstract Paint­ing” has been added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack­son Pol­lock 51: Short Film Cap­tures the Painter Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

MoMA Puts Pol­lock, Rothko & de Koon­ing on Your iPad

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

30 Hours of Doctor Who Audio Dramas Now Free to Stream Online

in Radio, Sci Fi | May 8th, 2017

“Yes, this should pro­vide ade­quate sus­te­nance for the Doc­tor Who marathon,” once said The Simp­sons’ Com­ic Book Guy while push­ing a wheel­bar­row full of fast-food tacos down the street. As the embod­i­ment of fan­dom for all things fan­ta­sy and sci-fi, he would cer­tain­ly know that Doc­tor Who, no longer an obscure BBC tele­vi­sion show but an ever-expand­ing fic­tion­al uni­verse with a glob­al fan base, con­sti­tutes the ide­al mate­r­i­al for binge-watch­ing, which he could now do at his con­ve­nience on a ser­vice like Brit­box. But it isn’t just watch­ing: now, on Spo­ti­fy (whose free soft­ware you can down­load here if you don’t have it already), you can binge-lis­ten to thir­ty straight hours of Doc­tor Who audio dra­mas as well.

“An icon of mod­ern British cul­ture and the longest-run­ning sci­ence-fic­tion TV show in his­to­ry, Doc­tor Who has nev­er been more pop­u­lar than it is today,” wrote Christo­pher Bahn in the AV Club’s 2010 primer on the series, which had relaunched five years ear­li­er after ini­tial­ly run­ning from 1963 to 1989. “No mat­ter who’s play­ing the lead, the basic premise has been essen­tial­ly the same since the show’s debut: A mys­te­ri­ous, eccen­tric alien known only as The Doc­tor (not ‘Doc­tor Who,’ in spite of the title) trav­els through time and space hav­ing adven­tures and fight­ing evil. He’s usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by one or two humans picked up along the way. They jour­ney with him in a time machine called a TARDIS, which looks like a blue phone booth.”

This for­mat “allowed the show to lit­er­al­ly go any­where in the uni­verse and some­times out­side it, with vir­tu­al­ly lim­it­less sto­ry­telling pos­si­bil­i­ties.” At its best, “Doc­tor Who relied on sol­id, imag­i­na­tive scripts to cre­ate smart sci­ence-fic­tion thrillers with a human­is­tic, anti-author­i­tar­i­an heart. Con­sis­tent­ly pop­u­lar through the 1960s and 1970s, the show began to fal­ter in the fol­low­ing decade as tight bud­gets and ques­tion­able artis­tic choic­es took their toll.” After its can­cel­la­tion in 1989, Doc­tor Who “lived on through the ’90s, as sci­ence-fic­tion shows often do, in the wilder­ness gen­res of semi-offi­cial nov­els and radio plays.”

The best known of these Doc­tor Who radio plays, which you can hear on this playlist, come pro­duced by a com­pa­ny called Big Fin­ish. Hav­ing acquired a license from the BBC in 1999 (and recent­ly renewed it into 2025), they’ve put out a range of audio dra­mas, both one-offs and series of var­i­ous lengths, using not just the char­ac­ters but many of the actu­al actors from the tele­vi­sion show, includ­ing six of those who have tak­en on the icon­ic Doc­tor role onscreen. Owing to the fact that Doc­tor Who offi­cial­ly has no canon and thus no need for con­ti­nu­ity, rig­or­ous or oth­er­wise, they can get even more imag­i­na­tive than their source mate­r­i­al, going so far as to explore coun­ter­fac­tu­al sto­ry­lines such as one where the Doc­tor nev­er leaves his home plan­et in the first place.

Below you’ll find a com­plete list, assem­bled by a fan on Red­dit, of the series and episodes of Big Fin­ish’s Doc­tor Who audio dra­mas now avail­able on Spo­ti­fy and are now housed to our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books. The mate­r­i­al comes to thir­ty hours in total, but the ques­tion of when to lis­ten to it falls sec­ond to a more impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion: what sort of sus­te­nance will best ensure that you can keep up with all of the Doc­tor’s audio adven­tures?

Main Range:

1. The Sirens of Time
2. Phan­tas­mago­ria
3. Whis­pers of Ter­ror
4. The Land of the Dead
5. The Fear­mon­ger
6. The Mar­i­an Con­spir­a­cy
7. The Geno­cide Machine
8. Red Dawn
9. The Spec­tre of Lany­on Moor
10. Win­ter for the Adept
11. The Apoc­a­lypse Ele­ment
12. The Fires of Vul­can
13. The Shad­ow of the Scourge
14. The Holy Ter­ror
15. The Mutant Phase
16. Storm Warn­ing
17. Sword of Ori­on
18. The Stones of Venice
19. Min­uet in Hell
20. Loups-Garoux
21. Dust Breed­ing
22. Blood­tide
23. Project: Twi­light
24. The Eye of the Scor­pi­on
25. Colditz
26. Primeval
27. The One Doc­tor
28. Invaders from Mars
29. The Chimes of Mid­night
30. Sea­sons of Fear
31. Embrace the Dark­ness
32. The Time of the Daleks
33. Nev­er­land
34. Spare Parts
35. …ish
36. The Rap­ture
37. The Sand­man
38. The Church and the Crown
39. Bang-Bang-a-Boom!
40. Jubilee
41. Nekro­man­teia
42. The Dark Flame
43. Doc­tor Who and the Pirates
44. Crea­tures of Beau­ty
45. Project: Lazarus
46. Flip-Flop
47. Omega
48. Davros
49. Mas­ter
50. Zagreus

Spe­cial Releas­es:

UNIT: Domin­ion

The Davros Mis­sion

Fourth Doc­tor Adven­tures:

1.01 Des­ti­na­tion: Ner­va

1.02 The Renais­sance Man

1.03 The Wrath of the Iceni

1.04 Ener­gy of the Daleks

1.05 Trail of the White Worm

1.06 The Osei­don Adven­ture

Eighth Doc­tor Adven­tures:

1.1 Blood of the Daleks, Part 1

1.2 Blood of the Daleks, Part 2

1.3 Hor­ror of Glam Rock

1.4 Immor­tal Beloved

1.5 Pho­bos

1.6 No More Lies

1.7 Human Resources, Part 1

1.8 Human Resources, Part 2

The Lost Sto­ries:

1.01 The Night­mare Fair

1.02 Mis­sion to Mag­nus

1.03 Leviathan

1.04 The Hol­lows of Time

1.05 Par­adise 5

1.06 Point of Entry

1.07 The Song of Megaptera

1.08 The Macros

Box 1. The Fourth Doc­tor Box Set

The Com­pan­ion Chron­i­cles:

2.1 Moth­er Rus­sia

2.2 Heli­con Prime

2.3 Old Sol­diers

2.4 The Cat­a­lyst

Des­tiny of the Doc­tor:

1. Hunters of Earth
2. Shad­ow of Death
3. Vengeance of the Stones
4. Bab­ble­sphere
5. Smoke and Mir­rors
6. Trou­ble in Par­adise
7. Shock­wave
8. Ene­my Aliens
9. Night of the Whis­per
10. Death’s Deal
11. The Time Machine

Short Trips:

Vol­ume 1

Vol­ume 2

The Stage­plays:

1. The Ulti­mate Adven­ture
2. Sev­en Keys to Dooms­day
3. The Curse of the Daleks

Ber­nice Sum­mer­field:

Box 2. Road Trip

Box 3. Legion

Box 4. New Fron­tiers

Box 5. Miss­ing Per­sons

Grace­less:

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Dalek Empire:

1. Inva­sion of the Daleks
2. The Human Fac­tor
3. “Death to the Daleks!”
4. Project Infin­i­ty
5. Dalek War: Chap­ter One
6. Dalek War: Chap­ter Two
7. Dalek War: Chap­ter Three
8. Dalek War: Chap­ter Four

Jago & Lite­foot:

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Series 4

Series 5

Counter-Mea­sures:

Series 1

Series 2

Iris Wildthyme:

2.1 The Sound of Fear

2.2 The Land of Won­der

2.3 The Two Iris­es

2.4 The Pan­da Inva­sion

2.5 The Claws of San­ta

Series 3

Series 4

UNIT:

1. Time Heals
2. Snake Head
3. The Longest Night
4. The Wast­ing

I, Davros:

1. Inno­cence
2. Puri­ty
3. Cor­rup­tion
4. Guilt

Cyber­man:

1.1 Scor­pius

1.2 Fear

1.3 Con­ver­sion

1.4 Telos

2.0 Cyber­man 2

Char­lotte Pol­lard:

Series 1

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Brit­Box Now Stream­ing Now Stream­ing 550 Episodes of Doc­tor Who and Many Oth­er British TV Shows

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Doc­tor Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

Vin­cent van Gogh Vis­its a Mod­ern Muse­um & Gets to See His Artis­tic Lega­cy: A Touch­ing Scene from Doc­tor Who

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

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

The Pioneering Physics TV Show, The Mechanical Universe, Is Now on YouTube: 52 Complete Episodes from Caltech

in Online Courses, Physics | May 8th, 2017

In Decem­ber, Cal­tech announced that the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed TV series, The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse… And Beyond, has been made avail­able in its entire­ty on YouTube. Cre­at­ed at Cal­tech and aired on PBS from 1985–86, the 52-episode series offers an intro­duc­tion to col­lege-lev­el physics, cov­er­ing every­thing from the sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tion begun by Coper­ni­cus, to quan­tum the­o­ry. A uni­ver­si­ty web page offers more details on the pro­duc­tion:

The series was based on the Physics 1a and 1b cours­es devel­oped by David Good­stein, the Frank J. Gilloon Dis­tin­guished Teach­ing and Ser­vice Pro­fes­sor and Pro­fes­sor of Physics and Applied Physics, Emer­i­tus.

Each episode opens and clos­es with Good­stein lec­tur­ing to his fresh­man physics class in 201 E. Bridge, pro­vid­ing philo­soph­i­cal, his­tor­i­cal, and often humor­ous insight into the day’s top­ic. The show also con­tains hun­dreds of com­put­er ani­ma­tion seg­ments, cre­at­ed by JPL com­put­er graph­ics engi­neer James F. Blinn, as the pri­ma­ry tool of instruc­tion. Dynam­ic loca­tion footage and his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ations are also used to stress the fact that sci­ence is a human endeav­or…

Although the series was designed as a col­lege-lev­el course, “thou­sands of high school teach­ers across the US came to depend on it for instruc­tion­al and inspi­ra­tional use,” Good­stein says. “The lev­el of instruc­tion in the US was, and remains, abysmal­ly low, and these 52 pro­grams filled a great void.”

You can stream all 52 episodes above. Or find them on Youtube and Dai­ly­Mo­tion. They will also be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Vis­it this Cal­tech web­site to get more infor­ma­tion on the show.

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 Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

The Famous Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics: The New Online Edi­tion (in HTML5)

Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe

The Neuronal Basis of Consciousness Course: A Free Online Course from Caltech

in | May 5th, 2017

“This award-win­ning, nine unit course (The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness), taught in the spring of each year at Cal­tech, is con­cerned with the cor­re­lates of con­scious­ness in the brain. The course focus­es on the anato­my, phys­i­ol­o­gy and psy­chol­o­gy of sen­so­ry con­scious­ness in the mam­malian brain, in par­tic­u­lar visu­al per­cep­tion. Oth­er top­ics include coma and oth­er dis­tur­bances of con­scious­ness, clin­i­cal case stud­ies (e.g., prosopag­nosia, neglect), atten­tion, mem­o­ry, zom­bie sys­tems, free will and some philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions of inter­est to the stu­dent of con­scious­ness.

With the help of Leila Red­dy, a grad­u­ate stu­dent in the Koch lab­o­ra­to­ry, and Leslie Max­field and her team from Aca­d­e­m­ic Media Tech­nolo­gies at Cal­tech, these lec­tures have been filmed, edit­ed and put online.

They are orga­nized into 16 lec­tures, each about one hour. They fol­low the text­book by the lec­tur­er, Christof Koch (with much help from his close col­league and men­tor, Fran­cis Crick), “The Quest for Con­scious­ness — A Neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal Approach.” See each video’s “About” text for the lec­ture’s cor­re­spond­ing chap­ter or chap­ters.”

You can watch the videos all above, or on Youtube via this playlist.

The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness will be added to our list of Free Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion.

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!

A History of Alternative Music Brilliantly Mapped Out on a Transistor Radio Circuit Diagram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

in Music | May 5th, 2017

Lump­ing millions—billions!—of peo­ple togeth­er arbi­trar­i­ly by their birth­dates sounds ridicu­lous in the abstract. But when we lump togeth­er gen­er­a­tions with clus­ters of pop cul­tur­al ref­er­ences, it always seems to give the con­cept flesh. A cer­tain cohort around the world—ye olde Gen­er­a­tion X (though few­er and few­er peo­ple prob­a­bly know where that comes from)—can mea­sure their com­mon sen­si­bil­i­ties by a con­stel­la­tion of musi­cal ref­er­ences dat­ing back to the late six­ties and for­ward to the ear­ly oughts (where­by the runts of the bunch final­ly got around to hav­ing kids and most­ly stopped leav­ing the house after din­ner).

But instead of a con­stel­la­tion for the web of con­nec­tions that some­how joins Ryan Adams, The Spe­cials, and Sui­cide, the graph­ic above (view it in a larg­er zoomable for­mat here) takes as its source the cir­cuit dia­gram for the first com­mer­cial tran­sis­tor radio from 1954, and well… “Well Done,” is all I can say. Design­er James Quail began “Alter­na­tive Love,” as it’s called, with the Sex Pis­tols, then worked his way back to David Bowie, the MC5, the Stooges, and the Vel­vet Under­ground and for­ward to The Strokes, Radio­head, the Arc­tic Mon­keys, and Arcade Fire.

These lin­eages seem fair­ly obvi­ous, as does the pro­gres­sion from the Ramones through the Smiths in the four large cir­cles in the cen­ter, which dri­ve pow­er­ful cur­rents to the dis­parate likes of Nir­vana, Depeche Mode, Shel­lac, the Human League, and Can. Does it work his­tor­i­cal­ly? Not exact­ly, but that’s hard­ly the point.

Quail’s “chart­ed his­to­ry of counter-cul­ture rock music,” writes Mar­garet Rhodes at Wired, “spills out… not in any kind of lin­ear board game way.” It start­ed with a rumor—that the audi­ence of the Sex Pis­tols’ June 4, 1976 show at the Less­er Free Trade Hall in Man­ches­ter “includ­ed guys who would go on to start bands like The Smiths, Joy Divi­sion, and the Buz­zcocks.” It might as well have jumped off from Bri­an Eno’s famous quote about every­one who bought the Vel­vet Underground’s debut album start­ing their own band. What mat­ters here is that it works: explor­ing the num­ber of intri­cate con­nec­tions between these bands with more breadth and imme­di­a­cy than most alter­na­tive cul­ture his­to­ries.

While Rhodes com­pares it to a stream­ing ser­vice that uses “musi­cal con­nec­tions to iden­ti­fy lis­ten­ing rec­om­men­da­tions,” there’s much more going on here than Pandora’s algo­rithms might man­age. You’ll find the garage rock revival­ism of Thee Oh Sees, The White Stripes, and Ty Segall pop up on your inter­net radio, but most machine intel­li­gences wouldn’t link them so neat­ly, as Quail does, with sem­i­nal, if obscure, acts like Bil­ly Childish’s 90s band Thee Head­coats or 60s garage rock­ers The Son­ics. Dorothy, the design house respon­si­ble for “Alter­na­tive Love,” allows you to zoom in on every part of the dia­gram to find lit­tle clus­ters of jan­gle pop, shoegaze, post-punk, grunge, synth pop, Brit­pop, hard­core, and neo-psych.

The blue­print, Dorothy explains, “cel­e­brates over 300 musi­cians, artists, man­agers and pro­duc­ers who (in our opin­ion) have been piv­otal to the evo­lu­tion of the alter­na­tive and inde­pen­dent music scene.” You can buy the blue­print as a poster ($45), and it will make a bril­liant gift for the mid­dle-aged music nerd in your life, as does an ear­li­er dia­gram, “Elec­tric Love,” which traces the devel­op­ment of elec­tron­ic music from Thomas Edi­son to Nine Inch Nails, using—what else?—the schemat­ic of a Theremin.

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:

A Mas­sive 800-Track Playlist of 90s Indie & Alter­na­tive Music, in Chrono­log­i­cal Order

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

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

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

Watch Coda, a Prize-Winning, Thought-Provoking Animation About a Lost Soul’s Encounter with Death

in Animation, Life | May 5th, 2017

Alan Hol­ly’s short ani­mat­ed film, Coda, was short­list­ed for the 2015 Acad­e­my Awards and nom­i­nat­ed for an Annie Award, on its way to win­ning 18 awards at film fes­ti­vals across the world (includ­ing Best Ani­mat­ed Short Film at South by South­west). As you prob­a­bly know, a coda is typ­i­cal­ly the pas­sage that brings a song/musical piece to a close. In the case of Hol­ly’s film, it refers to the end of life, a soul’s attempt to bar­gain with Death before even­tu­al­ly accept­ing his fate.

Accord­ing to Film­base, the nine-minute, hand-ani­mat­ed film is “the cul­mi­na­tion of two years of painstak­ing work by a small team of ded­i­cat­ed ani­ma­tion artists” in Ire­land. And it’s voiced “by Bri­an Glee­son (Stand­by, The Stag, Love/Hate) and Orla Fitzger­ald (The Wind that Shakes the Bar­ley).”

Aes­thet­i­cal­ly, writes Short of the Week, the “film com­bines many ele­ments in a unique way—the flat shapes and refined col­or palettes (seen also in work by Matthias Hoegg) with the painter­ly, organ­ic move­ment of greats like Miyaza­ki. In fact, one could almost view the film as a mod­ern day Miyaza­ki film with it’s piano score, sur­re­al ele­ments, and pow­er­ful char­ac­ters.”

Coda will be added to our list of Free Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More. You can watch it above.

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:

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale

Rik May­all Voic­es the Ani­ma­tion “Don’t Fear Death” Just Months Before His Untime­ly Pass­ing

John Cleese’s Eulo­gy for Gra­ham Chap­man: ‘Good Rid­dance, the Free-Load­ing Bas­tard, I Hope He Fries’

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

“If Life Were Only Like This”: Woody Allen Gets Marshall McLuhan to Put a Pontificating Professor in His Place

in Comedy, Film, Life | May 5th, 2017

The dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion cre­at­ed a mighty forum for those who once held forth from around the pick­le bar­rel or atop a stur­dy soap box.

The Inter­net has spawned many com­men­ta­tors whose thoughts are cogent, well researched and well argued, but they’re sad­ly out­num­bered by a mul­ti­tude of blowhards, wind­bags, and oth­er self-appoint­ed experts, force­ful­ly express­ing opin­ions as fact.

And, as you’ve like­ly heard, many con­sumers fail to check cre­den­tials before believ­ing unsub­stan­ti­at­ed state­ments are the rock sol­id truth, to be repeat­ed and act­ed upon, some­times to last­ing con­se­quence.

Com­pare the unman­age­abil­i­ty of our sit­u­a­tion to that of 40 years ago, when an obnox­ious blovi­a­tor could appar­ent­ly be silenced by the intro­duc­tion of irrefutable author­i­ty…

Ah, wait, this is fic­tion…

A notable thing about the above scene from 1977’s Annie Hall—besides how beau­ti­ful­ly the com­e­dy holds up—is that the bad guy’s not stu­pid. His qual­i­fi­ca­tions are actu­al­ly quite impres­sive.

(We speak here of the Guy in Line, not writer-direc­tor-star Woody Allen, whose rep­u­ta­tion has been per­ma­nent­ly tar­nished by per­son­al mis­con­duct, some of it easy to sub­stan­ti­ate.)

The scene’s best punch­line comes from pit­ting intel­lec­tu­al against intel­lec­tu­al, not intel­lec­tu­al against some myth­i­cal “reg­u­lar” Amer­i­can, as we’ve come to expect.

The audi­ence is well posi­tioned to side with Allen and his ace-in-the-hole, media philoso­pher Mar­shall McLuhan. It’s a revenge fan­ta­sy designed to appeal to any­one whose free­dom has been impinged by some loud­mouthed stranger sound­ing off in a pub­lic area.

That’s all of us, right? (Though how many of us are will­ing to cop to the occa­sions when we may have been the nar­cis­sis­tic jerk monop­o­liz­ing the con­ver­sa­tion at top vol­ume …)

The court­ly McLuhan, a last minute replace­ment for direc­tor Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, pos­sessed the per­fect tem­pera­ment to skew­er the over­in­flat­ed self-worth of a pon­tif­i­cat­ing ego­ma­ni­ac.

He was, how­ev­er, not much of a per­former, accord­ing to Rus­sell Hor­ton, who played the Guy in Line:

Woody would pull him out and he’d say some­thing like, ‘Well you’re wrong, young man.’ Or, ‘Oh, gee, I don’t know what to say.’… We did like 17 or 18 takes, and if you look at it care­ful­ly in the movie, McLuhan says, ‘You mean my whole fal­la­cy is wrong’ which makes no sense. How can you have your fal­la­cy wrong?

Read the recent, and extreme­ly amus­ing Enter­tain­ment Week­ly inter­view with Guy in Line (and voice of the Trix cere­al rab­bit) Hor­ton in its entire­ty here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan in Two Min­utes: A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1960s Media The­o­rist Who Pre­dict­ed Our Present

Woody Allen Tells a Clas­sic Joke About Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald & Gertrude Stein in 1965: A Pre­cur­sor to Mid­night in Paris

Woody Allen Amus­es Him­self by Giv­ing Untruth­ful Answers in Unaired 1971 TV Inter­view

Watch a 44-Minute Super­cut of Every Woody Allen Stam­mer, From Every Woody Allen Film

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

“Play Without Bitching About the Key,” and Other Humorous, Blunt Annotations Added to Musical Scores

in Music | May 5th, 2017

The stan­dard sys­tem of musi­cal nota­tion has, through­out its evo­lu­tion, served many dif­fer­ent eras of human­i­ty, and increas­ing­ly many dif­fer­ent cul­tures, quite well indeed. Still, though, when its pure­ly visu­al ele­ments can’t get the com­po­si­tion­al inten­tion ful­ly across, one must resort to incor­po­rat­ing ver­bal instruc­tions, and some­times those instruc­tions can seem… uncon­ven­tion­al. Clas­sic FM’s list of “bizarre, per­plex­ing and dis­tress­ing per­for­mance direc­tions” includes com­mands to play at “tem­po di PBS doc­u­men­tary,” to “con­tin­ue in tem­po, ignor­ing con­duc­tor,” and — these favorites of Erik Satie — to play as if “imbi­bet” (drunk­en) and “cor­pu­len­tus” (cor­pu­lent).

Not long ago, jazz crit­ic Ted Gioia, a man who’s seen a more than a few scores in his time, tweet­ed out a set of images of what he called “blunt musi­cal direc­tions.” These instruct their per­form­ers to “play with­out bitch­ing about the key” — G‑flat major not, I gath­er, being the most enjoy­able of them all — to make a “soft moan through instru­ment if pos­si­ble,” to “STAND; TURN AROUND; BEND OVER AND PLAY OBOE BETWEEN LEGS,” to “play with­out tak­ing a pic­ture and upload­ing to Face­book,” and — per­haps most impor­tant of all — to “lay that shit down!”

To those who can’t read a score, the abil­i­ty to turn a bunch of lines, dots, and oth­er even less intu­itive­ly deci­pher­able sym­bols into full-bod­ied music on the fly looks like a super­pow­er. But those who can read a score know that the real musi­cian­ship all hap­pens between what some com­pos­er wrote on the page and what the audi­ence hears, bal­anc­ing loy­al­ty to the com­poser’s inten­tion with the degree of per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion that makes the piece come alive. All the dis­ci­pline cul­ti­vat­ed through musi­cal train­ing no doubt ensures that most of them can resist the temp­ta­tion of Face­book while actu­al­ly play­ing, but when a com­poser’s direc­tions get real­ly ambigu­ous, cranky, or sim­ply strange — well, that’s where their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment comes in. And so live music remains inter­est­ing, even this deep into the age of the record­ed stuff.

via @Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

See The Guidon­ian Hand, the Medieval Sys­tem for Read­ing Music, Get Brought Back to Life

“Hum­ming­bird,” A New Form of Music Nota­tion That’s Eas­i­er to Learn and Faster to Read

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

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

The Museum of Failure: A New Swedish Museum Showcases Harley-Davidson Perfume, Colgate Beef Lasagne, Google Glass & Other Failed Products

in Business, Museums, Technology | May 4th, 2017

Here, in Sil­i­con Val­ley, fail­ure isn’t always fail­ure. At least accord­ing to the local mythol­o­gy, it’s some­thing to be embraced, accept­ed, even cel­e­brat­ed. “Fail fast, fail often,” they say. And even­tu­al­ly you’ll learn enough to achieve real suc­cess.

On June 7th, the Muse­um of Fail­ure will open in Hels­ing­borg, Swe­den. There you’ll find the remains of failed inno­va­tion. Google Glass, the Sony Beta­max, the Apple New­ton, Noki­a’s N‑gage–they’re all there. Dit­to a bot­tle of Harley-David­son Per­fume, Coca-Cola BlāK (aka cof­fee-fla­vored coke), and a Col­gate Beef Lasagne TV Din­ner. And, don’t for­get the Trump monop­oly-style board game–part of a long line of failed Trump prod­ucts and busi­ness­es.

Above, cura­tor Samuel West high­lights items in the col­lec­tion. Bring­ing togeth­er over 60 failed prod­ucts and ser­vices from around the world, the col­lec­tion pro­vides “unique insight into the risky busi­ness of inno­va­tion.” You can get anoth­er glimpse of the new insti­tu­tion below. Fit­ting­ly, the muse­um is free.

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 Long Game of Cre­ativ­i­ty: If You Haven’t Cre­at­ed a Mas­ter­piece at 30, You’re Not a Fail­ure

Oprah Winfrey’s Har­vard Com­mence­ment Speech: Fail­ure is Just Part of Mov­ing Through Life

Paulo Coel­ho on The Fear of Fail­ure

How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Course from Y Com­bi­na­tor Taught at Stan­ford

Seth Godin’s Start­up School: A Free Mini-Course for New Entre­pre­neurs