Above, we have the Alulu Beer Receipt. Written in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt documents a transaction. A brewer, named Alulu, delivered “the best” beer to a recipient named Ur-Amma, who apparently also served as the scribe. The Mesopotamians drank beer daily. And while they considered it a staple of everyday life, they also regarded it as a divine gift—something that contributed to human happiness and well-being.
Los Angeles is hardly a city known for its varied weather, but if one lives there long enough, one does become highly attuned to its many subtleties. (Granted, some of the local phenomena involved, like the notorious Santa Ana winds, can produce far-from-subtle effects.) The late David Lynch, who spent much of his life in Los Angeles, was more attuned to them than most. For a time, he even posted daily YouTube videos in which he talked about nothing else. Or rather, he talked about almost nothing else: much of the appeal of his weather reports, 950 of which you can watch on this playlist, lies in his unpredictable asides.
In addition to announcing the date (in a slightly eccentric form, e.g. “June one, two-thousand and twenty”), reading the temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and remarking on the presence or absence of “blue skies and golden sunshine,” Lynch would sometimes mention what was on his mind that day. “Today I’m thinking about tin cans,” he declared in his weather report for October 11th, 2020. A couple of months later, he was remembering Percy Faith’s theme from the Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue vehicle A Summer Place, which to him encapsulated the “romantic, wondrous feeling of the fifties” at that decade’s very end.
The weather-reporting Lynch showed an awareness of his audience as well, occasionally presenting them with a hand-drawn Valentine’s Day card or expression of thanks for viewing: “What a great bunch you all are, those of you who come each day to check out the weather.” But as Ali Raz writes in the Believer, one views Lynch’s weather reports “not to learn about the weather but to watch Lynch perform — even though, precisely because, he doesn’t perform in any actorly way. Instead, he performs himself.” And he’d been doing it in that form longer than many realized, having begun his reports as a call-in segment on Los Angeles radio station Indie 103.1 FM in 2005, then posting them as videos to his own web site.
Lynch returned to weather reportage on YouTube during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the at-home setting fashionable. His videos inspired some of their viewers, who presumably had more time on their hands than usual, to do the hard work of exegesis. One user of the David Lynch subreddit found the weather reports key to understanding Lynch’s work, specifically through “the idea of awareness. What does it mean to look at the world around us?” In his films, “this is accomplished by surrealism, violence, and a general sense of the unsettling or menacing. But those are vehicles for the idea of awareness, not its essence.” His Weather Reports show that “awareness doesn’t have to come through an extreme mental state, but could be part of our daily life,” in times of blue skies and golden sunshine or otherwise.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
We credit the Bauhaus school, founded by German architect Walter Gropius in 1919, for the aesthetic principles that have guided so much modern design and architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The school’s relationships with artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe mean that Bauhaus is closely associated with Expressionism and Dada in the visual and literary arts, and, of course, with the modernist industrial design and glass and steel architecture we associate with Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, among so many others.
We tend not to associate Bauhaus with the art of dance, perhaps because of the school’s founding ethos to bring what they saw as enervated fine arts and crafts traditions into the era of modern industrial production. The question of how to meet that demand when it came to perhaps one of the oldest of the performing arts might have puzzled many an artist.
But not Oskar Schlemmer. A polymath, like so many of the school’s avant-garde faculty, Schlemmer was a painter, sculptor, designer, and choreographer who, in 1923, was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop.
Before taking on that role, Schlemmer had already conceived, designed, and staged his most famous work, Das Triadische Ballett (The Triadic Ballet). “Schlemmer’s main theme,” says scholar and choreographer Debra McCall, “is always the abstract versus the figurative and his work is all about the conciliation of polarities—what he himself called the Apollonian and Dionysian. [He], like others, felt that mechanization and the abstract were two main themes of the day. But he did not want to reduce the dancers to automatons.” These concerns were shared by many modernists, who felt that the idiosyncrasies of the human could easily become subsumed in the seductive orderliness of machines.
Schlemmer’s intentions for The Triadic Ballet translate—in the descriptions of Dangerous Minds’ Amber Frost—to “sets [that] are minimal, emphasizing perspective and clean lines. The choreography is limited by the bulky, sculptural, geometric costumes, the movement stiflingly deliberate, incredibly mechanical and mathy, with a rare hint at any fluid dance. The whole thing is daringly weird and strangely mesmerizing.” You can see black and white still images from the original 1922 production above (and see even more at Dangerous Minds). To view these bizarrely costumed figures in motion, watch the video at the top, a 1970 recreation in full, brilliant color.
For various reasons, The Triadic Ballet has rarely been restaged, though its influence on futuristic dance and costuming is considerable. The Triadic Ballet is “a pioneering example of multi-media theater,” wrote Jack Anderson in review of a 1985 New York production; Schlemmer “turned to choreography,” writes Anderson, “because of his concern for the relationships of figures in space.” Given that the guiding principle of the work is a geometric one, we do not see much movement we associate with traditional dance. Instead the ballet looks like pantomime or puppet show, with figures in awkward costumes tracing various shapes around the stage and each other.
As you can see in the images further up, Schlemmer left few notes regarding the choreography, but he did sketch out the grouping and costuming of each of the three movements. (You can zoom in and get a closer look at the sketches above at the Bauhaus-archiv Museum.) As Anderson writes of the 1985 revived production, “unfortunately, Schlemmer’s choreography for these figures was forgotten long ago, and any new production must be based upon research and intuition.” The basic outlines are not difficult to recover. Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Schlemmer began to see ballet and pantomime as free from the baggage of traditional theater and opera. Drawing from the stylizations of pantomime, puppetry, and Commedia dell’Arte, Schlemmer further abstracted the human form in discrete shapes—cylindrical necks, spherical heads, etc—to create what he called “figurines.” The costuming, in a sense, almost dictates the jerky, puppet-like movements of the dancers. (These three costumes below date from the 1970 recreation of the piece.)
Schlemmer’s radical production has somehow not achieved the level of recognition of other avant-garde ballets of the time, including Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s, Nijinsky-choreographed The Rite of Spring. The Triadic Ballet, with music composed by Paul Hindemith, toured between 1922 and 1929, representing the ethos of the Bauhaus school, but at the end of that period, Schlemmer was forced to leave “an increasingly volatile Germany,” writes Frost. Revivals of the piece, such as a 1930 exhibition in Paris, tended to focus on the “figurines” rather than the dance. Schlemmer made many similar performance pieces in the 20s (such as a “mechanical cabaret”) that brought together industrial design, dance, and gesture. But perhaps his greatest legacy is the bizarre costumes, which were worn and copied at various Bauhaus costume parties and which went on to directly inspire the look of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the glorious excesses of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust stage show.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
For a film, explained a young Quentin Tarantino in one interview, “the real test of time isn’t the Friday that it opens. It’s how the film is thought of thirty years from now.” It just so happens that Pulp Fiction, which made Tarantino the most celebrated director in America practically on its opening day, came out thirty years ago last fall. That provided the occasion for the video essay from YouTuber Dodford above, which tells the story of how Tarantino became a filmmaker, assembled for the most part out of Tarantino’s own words — and in the not-quite-linear chronology with which people still associate him.
As Tarantino’s body of work has grown, it’s come to seem less defined by such sliced-and-diced timelines, or even by the obsessions with pop culture or graphic violence the media tended to exaggerate when first he rose to fame. “They thought it was far more violent than it was,” he says of the public reaction to his first feature Reservoir Dogs in a Charlie Rose interview from which this video draws. He could take that as a testament to his understanding of cinema, a form that draws its power just as often from what it doesn’t show as what it does.
Tarantino began cultivating that understanding early, throughout his movie-saturated childhood and his stint as a video-store clerk in Manhattan Beach. Contrary to popular belief, however, Video Archives didn’t make him a movie expert: “I was already a movie expert; that’s how I got hired.” It was during that period that he commenced work on My Best Friend’s Birthday, which he meant to be his first film. Though he never completed it even after three years of work, he did notice the artistic development evident in a comparison between its amateurish early scenes and its more effective later ones.
That failed project turned out to be “the best film school a person could possibly have,” and it prepared him to seize the opportunities that would come later. After writing and selling the script for True Romance, he was in a position to work on Reservoir Dogs, which eventually made it to production thanks to the interest of Harvey Keitel, who would play Mr. White. When that picture got attention at Sundance and became an indie hit, Tarantino went off on a European sojourn, ostensibly in order to work on his next script — and to figure out how to beat “the dreaded sophomore curse,” something with which he’d had much second-hand experience as a disappointed moviegoer.
The fruit of those labors, a crime-story anthology called Pulp Fiction, first seemed, incredibly, to promise little box-office potential. But one senses that Tarantino knew exactly what he had, because he knew his audience. It’s not that he’d commissioned intensive market research, but that, as he once put it, “It’s me; I’m the audience.” And so he’s remained over the past three decades, drawing ever closer to completing what, as he’s often said, will ultimately constitute a ten-picture filmography. Actually stopping there would, of course, risk the disappointment of his many fans, who only want more. But when a filmmaker keeps at it too long, as the cinephile in Tarantino well understands, he runs the far more dire risk of disappointing himself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created a majestic 417-megapixel panorama of the Andromeda galaxy, located some 2.5 million light-years away from our planet. Taking more than a decade to complete, the photomosaic captures 200 million stars, which is only a fraction of Andromeda’s estimated one trillion stars. According to NASA, the 2.5 billion pixel mosaic “will help astronomers piece together the galaxy’s past history that includes mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.” On this NASA website, you can download a copy of the mosaic, and learn more about the exploration of Andromeda.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptation of Dune is generally considered to be superior to the late David Lynch’s, from 1984 — though even according to many of Lynch’s fans, it could hardly have been worse. In a 1996 piece for Premiere magazine, David Foster Wallace described Dune as “unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career,” not least due to the miscasting of the director himself: “Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history,” marshaled by super-producer Dino De Laurentiis. But could even a master blockbuster craftsman have made cinematic sense of Frank Herbert’s original story, “which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain”?
With its two parts having been released in the twenty-twenties, Villeneuve’s Dune practically cries out for Youtube video essays comparing it to Lynch’s version. The one above from Archer Green first highlights their differences through one scene that was memorable in the novel and both films: when, being put to the test by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the young hero Paul Atreides, played in the old Dune by Kyle MacLachlan and the new one by Timothée Chalamet, inserts his hand into a box that inflicts extreme pain. Superficially similar though they may appear, the two sequences reveal defining qualities of each picture’s look and feel — Villeneuve’s is shadowy and full of ancient-looking details, while Lynch’s looks like a piece of retro-futuristic Jacobean theater — as well as the contrast between how they dramatize the source material.
The new Dune is “a very modern-looking film that goes for a realistic and grounded aesthetic, and it feels more like a serious prestige sci-fi movie,” says Archer Green, “whereas old Dune is more surrealist: it’s elaborate, grungy, and ultimately quite over the top.” Their having been made in different eras explains some of this, but so does their having been made at different scales of time. Viewed back-to-back, Villeneuve’s Dune movies run just over five and a half hours. Lynch openly admitted that he’d “sold out” his right to the final cut in exchange for a major Hollywood project, but he also seldom failed to mention that the studio demanded that the film be “squeezed” to two hours and 17 minutes in order to guarantee a certain minimum number of daily screenings.
This pressure to get the runtime down must have motivated some of what even in the nineteen-eighties felt old-fashioned about Lynch’s Dune, like its extended “exposition dumps” and its “having characters’ thoughts audibilized on the soundtrack while the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking face,” as Wallace put it. The film’s failure “could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack, doing effects-intensive gorefests for commercial studios” or “sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure, plotless 16mm’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd.” Instead, he took the paltry deal subsequently offered him by De Laurentiis and made Blue Velvet, whose success he rode to become a major cultural figure. In a way, Lynch’s Dune fiasco gave Chalamet the eventual opportunity to become the definitive Paul Atreides — and MacLachlan, to become Special Agent Dale Cooper.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
During their days filming Documentary Now!, a mockumentary series that aired on IFC, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader teamed up and created a fictionalized “history” of Simon and Garfunkel, telling the “real” story behind the making of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Mrs. Robinson”–stories you’ve assuredly never heard before. Have a laugh. Enjoy!
As every cinephile has by now heard, and lamented, we’ve just lost a great American filmmaker. From Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire, David Lynch’s features will surely continue to bewilder and inspire generation after generation of aspiring young auteurs. (There seems even to be a re-evaluation underway of his adaptation of Dune, the box-office catastrophe that turned him away from the Hollywood machine.) But Lynch was never exactly an aspiring young auteur himself. He actually began his career as a painter, just one of the many facets of his artistic existence that we’ve featured over the years here at Open Culture.
Lynch studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and the urban decay of Philadelphia at the time did a great deal to inspire the aesthetic of Eraserhead, which made his name on the midnight-movie circuit a decade later. When the MTV era fired up in just a few years, he found his signature blend of grotesquerie and hyper-normality — what would soon be termed “Lynchian” — in demand from certain like-minded recording artists. It was around that same time that he launched a side career as a comic artist, or in any case a comic writer, contributing a thoroughly static yet compellingly varied strip called The Angriest Dog in the World to the LA Reader from the early eighties through the early nineties.
In 1987, the year after the art-house blockbuster that was Blue Velvet set off what Guy Maddin later called “the last real earthquake in American cinema,” Lynch hosted a BBC television series on the history of surrealist film. That ultra-mass medium would turn out to be a surprisingly receptive venue for his highly idiosyncratic art: first he made commercials, then he co-created with Mark Frost the ABC mystery series Twin Peaks, which practically overtook American popular culture when it debuted in 1990. (See also these video essays on the making and meaning of the show.) Not that the phenomenon was limited to the U.S., as evidenced by Lynch’s going on to direct a mini-season of Twin Peaks in the form of canned-coffee commercials for the Japanese market.
Even Mulholland Drive, the picture many consider to be Lynch’s masterpiece, was conceived as a pilot for a TV show. Not long after its release, he put out more work in serial form, including the savage cartoon Dumbland and the harrowing sitcom homage Rabbits (later incorporated into Inland Empire, his final film). In the late two-thousands, he presented Interview Project, a documentary web series co-created by his son; in the early twenty-tens, he put out his first (but not last) solo music album, Crazy Clown Time. That same decade, his photographs of old factories went on display, his line of organic coffee came onto the market, his autobiography was published, and his MasterClass went online.
Lynch remained prolific through the COVID-19 pandemic of the twenty-twenties, in part by posting Los Angeles weather reports from his home to his YouTube channel. In recent years, he announced that he would never retire, despite living with a case of emphysema so severe that he could no longer direct in any conventional manner. Such are the wages, as he acknowledged, of having smoked since age seven, though he also seemed to believe that every habit and choice in life contributed to his work. Perhaps the smoking did its part to inspire him, like his long practice of Transcendental Meditation or his daily milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy, about all of which he spoke openly in life. But if there’s any particular secret of his formidable creativity, it feels as if he’s taken it with him.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people start watching the horizon for smoke and tuning in to another of those extreme local possibilities — in this instance, that of imminent devastation.” The New Yorker published this piece in 1989, when Los Angeles’ fire season was “a particularly early and bad one,” but it’s one of many writings on the same phenomenon now circulating again, with the highly destructive Palisades Fire still burning away.
Back in 1989, longtime Angelenos would have cited the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a particularly vivid example of what misfortune the Santa Ana winds could bring. Widely recognized as a byword for affluence (not unlike the now virtually obliterated Pacific Palisades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Huxley — all of whose houses counted among the 484 destroyed in the conflagration (in which, miraculously, no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air Fire and its aftermath in “Design for Disaster,” a short documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department and narrated by William Conrad (whose voice would still have been instantly recognizable as that of Marshal Matt Dillon from the golden-age radio drama Gunsmoke).
Los Angeles’ repeated affliction by these blazes is perhaps overdetermined. The factors include not just the dreaded Santa Anas, but also the geography of its canyons, the dryness of the vegetation in its chaparral (not, pace Didion, desert) ecology, and the inability of its water-delivery system to meet such a sudden and enormous need (which also proved fateful in the Palisades Fire). It didn’t help that the typical house at the time was built with “a combustible roof; wide, low eaves to catch sparks and fire; and a big picture window to let the fire inside,” nor that such dwellings were “closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads.” The Bel Air Fire brought about a wood-shingle roof ban and a more intensive brush-clearance policy, but the six decades of fire seasons since do make one wonder what kind of measures, if any, could ever subdue these particular forces of nature.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In the summer of 1981, the British band Queen was recording tracks for their tenth studio album, Hot Space, at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. As it happened, David Bowie had scheduled time at the same studio to record the title song for the movie Cat People. Before long, Bowie stopped by the Queen sessions and joined in. The original idea was that he would add backup vocals on the song “Cool Cat.” “David came in one night and we were playing other people’s songs for fun, just jamming,” says Queen drummer Roger Taylor in Mark Blake’s book Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Freddie Mercury and Queen. “In the end, David said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?’ ”
And so began a marathon session of nearly 24 hours, fueled, according to Blake, by wine and cocaine. Built around John Deacon’s distinctive bass line, the song was mostly written by Mercury and Bowie. Blake describes the scene, beginning with the recollections of Queen’s guitarist:
‘We felt our way through a backing track all together as an ensemble,’ recalled Brian May. ‘When the backing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go–just off the top of our heads–and we’ll compile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did.’ Some of these improvisations, including Mercury’s memorable introductory scatting vocal, would endure on the finished track. Bowie also insisted that he and Mercury shouldn’t hear what the other had sung, swapping verses blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel.
“It was very hard,” said May in 2008, “because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. Passions ran very high. I found it very hard because I got so little of my own way. But David had a real vision and he took over the song lyrically.” The song was originally titled “People on Streets,” but Bowie wanted it changed to “Under Pressure.” When the time came to mix the song at Power Station studios in New York, Bowie insisted on being there. “It didn’t go too well,” Blake quotes Queen’s engineer Reinhold Mack as saying. “We spent all day and Bowie was like, ‘Do this, do that.’ In the end, I called Freddie and said, ‘I need help here,’ so Fred came in as a mediator.” Mercury and Bowie argued fiercely over the final mix.
At one point Bowie threatened to block the release of the song, but it was issued to the public on October 26, 1981 and eventually rose to Number One on the British charts. It was later named the number 31 song on VH1’s list of the 100 greatest songs of the 1980s. “ ‘Under Pressure’ is a significant song for us,” May said in 2008, “and that is because of David and its lyrical content. I would have found that hard to admit in the old days, but I can admit it now.… But one day, I would love to sit down quietly on my own and re-mix it.”
After listening to the isolated vocal track above, you can hear the officially released 1981 mix below:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
For those looking to boost their skills or explore new fields without breaking the bank, Class Central has done the heavy lifting. Known as a search engine for online courses, Class Central has compiled what might be the largest collection of free online certificates and badges available anywhere. From tech giants like Google and Microsoft to elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, this list covers a diverse range of subjects and skill sets.
There was a time when the world’s top universities used to offer free certificates for completing online courses. While most of those certificates are no longer free, many of the courses themselves remain open to learners, covering topics like Computer Science, Literature, and Business.
Certificates can serve as both motivation and proof of achievement for completing online courses. While platforms like Coursera and edX have moved toward paid certifications, a surprising number of free options remain — if you know where to look. Thankfully, Class Central’s guide makes it easy to find these opportunities.
What’s Included in the Guide?
The article organizes free certificate offerings by providers, including:
Google: Over 1,000 free certificates and badges in topics like digital marketing, Android development, and AI.
Harvard: Free certificates for their popular CS50 series and other online courses.
Stanford Medicine: Medical courses offering free certificates and CME credit.
LinkedIn Learning: 110+ hours of free certifications in business, technology, and design.
Semrush Academy: 90+ courses with free certificates focused on marketing and SEO.
CodeSignal: 700+ free skill certifications to validate coding, technical abilities, and soft skills.
If you’re ready to explore the full list of free courses and certifications, head over to Class Central’s detailed guide: Massive List of Thousands of Free Certificates and Badges. It’s a treasure trove for anyone looking to learn something new, enhance their resume, or simply satisfy their curiosity — all for free!
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
