Look How Young They Are!: The Beastie Boys Performing Live Their Very First Hit, “Cooky Puss” (1983)

in Music | January 3rd, 2019

Would you look at this video? Here we have the orig­i­nal line-up of the Beast­ie Boys (when they had a fourth, female mem­ber, Kate Schel­len­bach) play­ing a Christ­mas-time gig in 1983. And you just wan­na scream: LOOK HOW YOUNG THEY ARE! Adam Yauch is prob­a­bly 17 at the time, Michael Dia­mond younger, and Adam Horowitz is younger still, and they are plain­ly enjoy­ing them­selves while also being a bit ner­vous and unsure. (Ad-Rock blanch­es when he has to brag about the size of his mem­ber, while Adam Yauch shows he had flow very ear­ly on.) I doubt any­body in the audi­ence was think­ing these white kids would go on to be one of the great­est rap groups of all time. Some were won­der­ing what hap­pened to the hard­core punk music they usu­al­ly played. And some were just hav­ing a blast.

The track they’re per­form­ing is “Cooky Puss,” their very first attempt at rap and, as it hap­pens, their very first 12” sin­gle release. To their sur­prise the record start­ed get­ting played in clubs.

For those who picked up the delight­ful, thor­ough, and very heavy Beast­ie Boys Book–we told you about it just recent­ly–the ori­gin of “Cook­ie Puss” is out­lined in detail. A friend of a friend got the young band a chance to record in a stu­dio usu­al­ly reserved for com­mer­cial jin­gles for two days. The first day the band played a selec­tion of orig­i­nals and cov­ers, but on play­back “we real­ized they were pret­ty bad,” writes Ad-Rock. “They weren’t hard­core songs, they were odd­ly Goth-ish and just sort of, well…pretty bad.”

With a sec­ond day at their dis­pos­al they returned, and based on a beat from Schel­len­bach, “Cooky Puss” was born, along with anoth­er orig­i­nal, “Beast­ie Rev­o­lu­tion.” The cen­ter­piece of the stu­dio ver­sion is a prank phone call between Ad-Rock, a tele­phone oper­a­tor, and a work­er at Carvel ice cream, which the adult Horowitz now cringes in mem­o­ry over. (“Can I for­mal­ly apol­o­gize right here and now? I’m sor­ry.”)

The Beast­ie Boys had start­ed as a hard­core band, fea­tur­ing Schel­len­bach on drums, and had record­ed an e.p., Pol­ly­wog Stew which final­ly got released, along with the Cooky Puss e.p. in 1994 as Some Old Bull­shit. But rap was every­where and, as Horowitz tells it, Mal­colm McLaren’s “Buf­fa­lo Gals” was the record that put hip hop on the map. “Cooky Puss” was their affec­tion­ate par­o­dy of that track. (Schel­len­bach, by the way, went on to form Lus­cious Jack­son)

As for the actu­al Cooky Puss, it was a weird ice cream cake sold by Carvel (with its own char­ac­ter and back­sto­ry), and pro­mot­ed on local TV with a set of ads fea­tur­ing the voice of own­er Tom Carvel him­self. Check out the won­der of the Cooky Puss and its plush toy com­pan­ion. Call now…they hon­or most major cred­it cards.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

‘Beast­ie Boys on Being Stu­pid’: An Ani­mat­ed Inter­view From 1985

Fight For Your Right Revis­it­ed: Adam Yauch’s 2011 Film Com­mem­o­rates the Beast­ie Boys’ Leg­endary Music Video

Librar­i­ans Pay Trib­ute to Clas­sic Beast­ie Boys Video; Name Hen­ry Rollins Keynote Speak­er at Con­fer­ence

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A 3D Animated History of Paris: Take a Visual Journey from Ancient Times to 1900

in History, Technology | January 2nd, 2019

“And this too,” mus­es Mar­low as he floats down the Thames in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness, “has been one of the dark places on earth.” Whole the­ses have been writ­ten on the mean­ing of this state­ment. We can sim­ply take it to mean that before Lon­don was Lon­don, it was just anoth­er obscure, hum­ble town of ordi­nary farm­ers and arti­sans. That is, before the Romans came. So too Paris.

One of the world’s most famous cities got its start as a clus­ter of hum­ble huts, walled com­pounds, and low, wood­en build­ings with thatched roofs and fenced-in pastures—the set­tle­ment of a Celtic tribe known as the Parisii, who began inhab­it­ing the region some­time in the 3rd cen­tu­ry, BCE. In the first cen­tu­ry, the Romans con­quered and set­tled what would become the Left Bank, and began to build an impres­sive, pros­per­ous city with a forum, tem­ples, bath­hous­es, and the­aters.

The Roman town was first called Lute­tia (or Luti­cia Pari­sio­rum) and the cen­tral forum, in French, the Forum de Lutèce. Chris­tian­i­ty came in the 3rd cen­tu­ry, sup­pos­ed­ly by way of Saint Denis, whom the Romans behead­ed on the hill lat­er known as Mons Mar­tyrum (“Hill of the Martyrs”)—later still, Mont­martre. Then came the Franks in the 5th cen­tu­ry, estab­lish­ing the Merovin­gian dynasty under Clo­vis in 508 and bring­ing with them Frank­ish speech, and lat­er the Fran­cien dialect of Île-de-France.

The rest—in broad out­line or fine detail—you may know, but if not, like all city’s his­to­ries, it is worth get­ting acquaint­ed. As you do, watch the video above from Das­sault Sys­temes’ Paris 3D, an “inter­ac­tive jour­ney through time” that strips away hun­dreds of years of his­to­ry to reveal vir­tu­al mod­els of the city dur­ing the peri­ods above and through the Mid­dle Ages, French Rev­o­lu­tion, and the 1889 World’s Fair, presided over by the just-built Eif­fel Tow­er.

The project “required the work of over 40 peo­ple, includ­ing numer­ous experts about Paris’s his­to­ry, for more than two years.” By 2013, it cov­ered the city’s “18,000 list­ed mon­u­ments” with a web­site, free iPad app, and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty book. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the fea­tures of its web appli­ca­tion seem to have been dis­abled and its app seems unavail­able, at least in the U.S. Still—like the vir­tu­al 3d videos of Rome we’ve fea­tured recent­ly—the pro­mo video above offers some impres­sive, beau­ti­ful­ly-ren­dered recon­struc­tions of the city one-thou­sand, fif­teen hun­dred, and over two thou­sand years ago.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Ani­mat­ed Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tours of Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak (Cir­ca 320 AD)

Take a 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the Sis­tine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and Oth­er Art-Adorned Vat­i­can Spaces

Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Lets You Fly Through 17th Cen­tu­ry Lon­don

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How the Inventor of Dynamite, Alfred Nobel, Read an Obituary That Called Him “The Merchant of Death” and Made Amends by Creating the Nobel Prize

in History, Life | January 2nd, 2019

No one can ever ful­ly pre­dict the con­se­quences of their actions. Still, some warn­ing bells should be hard to ignore. Take Alfred Nobel, for instance, the founder of the Nobel Prize. For most of his life, he had a dif­fer­ent reputation—as the inven­tor of dyna­mite, one of the most destruc­tive tech­nolo­gies of the age. Though he main­tained his motives were pure, Nobel had no short­age of signs telling him his cre­ation might do at least as much harm as good. He per­se­vered and lived to regret it, it’s said.

Born in Swe­den in 1833, Nobel became obsessed with explo­sives at a young age after meet­ing the inven­tor of nitro-glyc­erin. He spent some for­ma­tive years try­ing to har­ness its pow­er, even after a botched nitro-glyc­erin exper­i­ment at a fac­to­ry killed his younger broth­er and five oth­er work­ers. Nobel patent­ed dyna­mite in 1867, a “new, trans­portable explo­sive,” notes the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald video above, that “was an instant hit in the min­ing and con­struc­tion indus­tries.” Orig­i­nal­ly called “Nobel’s Blast­ing Pow­der,” the chemist and engi­neer soon choose a new name, from the ancient Greek work for “pow­er.”

It wouldn’t take long before dyna­mite became a con­ve­nient­ly dev­as­tat­ing weapon of war, espe­cial­ly in the Span­ish Amer­i­can War, which began two years after Alfred’s death. But ten years ear­li­er, in 1888, when the bot­tle was already well uncorked, Alfred received a shock when a French news­pa­per misiden­ti­fied him for his broth­er, Lud­wig, who had just died. His erro­neous pre-mortem obit­u­ary appeared with the head­line “The Mer­chant of Death is Dead!” The unspar­ing bio went on to say that Nobel “became rich by find­ing ways to kill more peo­ple faster than ever before.”

This may have not been his inten­tion, so he believed, but when he saw the image reflect­ed back at him, he imme­di­ate­ly sought to atone for his way­ward inven­tion. “Leg­end has it, Nobel was mor­ti­fied… and spent the rest of his life try­ing to estab­lish a pos­i­tive lega­cy.” He sought to con­nect peo­ple around the world, pio­neer­ing an ear­ly ver­sion of Google Earth “with bal­loons and rock­ets instead of satel­lites.” And when he died in 1896, he left half of his wealth, “over half a bil­lion dol­lars today, to estab­lish the Nobel Prizes.”

It is a fas­ci­nat­ing case, if we cred­it the mis­tak­en obit­u­ary for turn­ing Nobel’s life around. Adam Grant—whom Preet Bharara intro­duces on his pod­cast Stay Tuned as “an orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist and star pro­fes­sor at the Whar­ton School”—mentions Nobel as a “pret­ty rad­i­cal exam­ple of peo­ple chang­ing in pret­ty rad­i­cal ways.” There are sev­er­al prob­lems with this inter­pre­ta­tion. Nobel may have seen the light, but he did not rad­i­cal­ly change as a per­son. He was already an ide­al­is­tic inven­tor, as a Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty biog­ra­phy has it, a sup­port­er of “the peace move­ment” and a “tru­ly inter­na­tion­al fig­ure.”

Called by Vic­tor Hugo the “wealth­i­est vagabond in Europe,” Nobel wrote nov­els, poet­ry, dra­ma, and let­ters in five lan­guages. He had a broad human­ist out­look but for some rea­son could or would not see the worst uses of his prod­uct, even as his com­pa­ny sold weapons—to Italy for exam­ple, an act for which his adopt­ed nation of France deemed him a trai­tor in 1891.

Nobel’s first Swedish patent was for “ways to pre­pare gun­pow­der” and his father, also an inven­tor, man­aged the fam­i­ly fac­to­ry before him and made arms for the Crimean War. Like many a gild­ed age indus­tri­al­ist, Nobel turned away from the suf­fer­ing he caused, endow­ing the arts and sci­ences after death to ease his con­science in life, many think, but not to tru­ly ame­lio­rate the dam­age done.

Nobel’s com­pa­nies have sur­vived him, mak­ing rock­et launch­ers and the like as well as unde­ni­ably use­ful min­ing and con­struc­tion tools. His prizes, what­ev­er his inten­tions, have also done the world much good, not least in cre­at­ing a glob­al plat­form for deserv­ing lumi­nar­ies. (Those who have reject­ed Nobels have vig­or­ous­ly argued oth­er­wise.) Nobel was a sen­si­tive and com­pli­cat­ed indi­vid­ual whose life was filled with grief and loss and who left a last­ing lega­cy as a patron of intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture. He was also a man­u­fac­tur­er of dead­ly weapons of mass destruc­tion. Both of these things were true.

But even if he did not rad­i­cal­ly change—either his char­ac­ter or his busi­ness model—he did shift his per­spec­tive enough to have a tremen­dous impact on his lega­cy, which is the les­son Grant draws from his sto­ry. “Too often,” he tells Bharara, “we’re look­ing at our lives through a micro­scope,” obliv­i­ous to the larg­er scale. “What we actu­al­ly need is a wide-angle lens where we can zoom out and ask, what is my lega­cy? What is the impact of this behav­ior on my rep­u­ta­tion?” Some­times, says Grant, “peo­ple do not like the per­son that’s star­ing them in the mir­ror, and they decide they want to change.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1964: “It Was Mon­strous!”

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher (1957)

7 Nobel Speech­es by 7 Great Writ­ers: Hem­ing­way, Faulkn­er, and More

Hear Toni Morrison’s Poet­ic Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech on the Rad­i­cal Pow­er of Lan­guage (1993)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

450+ Movie Scenes Where Actors Break the Fourth Wall, Presented in Two Big Supercuts

in Film | January 2nd, 2019

Do you remem­ber the first time you saw the fourth wall bro­ken? Few of us prob­a­bly do, but maybe we all should, giv­en how radi­al a depar­ture from estab­lished dra­mat­ic con­ven­tion — specif­i­cal­ly, the con­ven­tion dic­tat­ing that a work of dra­mat­ic art not acknowl­edge the fact that it is a work of dra­mat­ic art — fourth-wall-break­age rep­re­sents. Then again, a work of art can break the fourth wall sub­tly, too sub­tly to make an out­sized impact on our con­scious­ness: take, for exam­ple, all the brief but know­ing glances movie char­ac­ters have direct­ed at their audi­ences through­out almost the entire his­to­ry of cin­e­ma.

A fair few of those glances appear in the super­cut of 400 break­ages of the fourth wall above (which may well con­tain the first one you ever wit­nessed). It draws from films from a vari­ety of time peri­ods, Hol­ly­wood clas­sics and block­busters as well as less­er-known pic­tures.

Togeth­er with the Press Play fourth-wall-break­age super­cut below, it pro­vides an overview of just how wide a vari­ety of ways film­mak­ers have found to momen­tar­i­ly breach what Vin­cent Can­by once described as “that invis­i­ble scrim that for­ev­er sep­a­rates the audi­ence from the stage.” Most films break the fourth wall for laughs, but oth­ers have done it in ser­vice of emo­tion­al, aes­thet­ic, and even intel­lec­tu­al ends.

None of this is to say that the fourth wall stood per­fect­ly intact before the colos­sus of cin­e­ma came along to smash it. The con­cept goes at least as far back as 17th-cen­tu­ry France, first used as a term by Molière and lat­er more ful­ly defined by Enlight­en­ment icon Denis Diderot. But the­atri­cal per­form­ers must have been break­ing the fourth wall, or at least pok­ing holes in it, even before the fourth wall was quite up: long ago, we read in his­tor­i­cal accounts of the­ater around the world, audi­ences even expect­ed a cer­tain degree of inter­ac­tion with the action onstage — or at least they expressed their thoughts on it, often force­ful­ly, attempt­ing to break the fourth wall from the oth­er direc­tion.

Over time, we, the cre­ators and view­ers of dra­ma alike, built the fourth wall, and it has sel­dom tak­en us long to expect its pro­tec­tion in every medi­um we enjoy: the­ater and film, yes, but tele­vi­sion, video games, and even lit­er­a­ture as well. “It is not a good idea to inter­rupt the nar­ra­tive too often,” writes J.M. Coet­zee in Eliz­a­beth Costel­lo, a nov­el that breaks the fourth wall and a host of oth­er con­ven­tion besides, “since sto­ry­telling works by lulling the read­er or lis­ten­er into a dream­like state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, super­seded by the time and space of the fic­tion.” A lit­er­ary sto­ry­teller of Coet­zee’s cal­iber would know. But what oth­er art form has been as often com­pared to a dream, or felt as much like a dream, as film — and what oth­er dreams play out on, lit­er­al­ly, a wall?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Them Watch Us: A His­to­ry of Break­ing the “Fourth Wall” in Film

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

We’re Gonna Build a Fourth Wall, and Make the Brechtians Pay for It

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Why Is English So Hard to Learn?: The Ingenious Poem, “The Chaos,” Documents 800 Irregularities in English Spelling and Pronunciation

in English Language, Poetry | January 2nd, 2019

In 1920, Dutch writer and trav­el­er Ger­ard Nolst Tren­ité, also known as Chari­var­ius, pub­lished a text­book called Drop Your For­eign Accent: engelsche uit­spraakoe­fenin­gen. In the appen­dix, he includ­ed a poem titled “The Chaos,” a vir­tu­oso, tongue-twist­ing demon­stra­tion of some­where around 800 irreg­u­lar­i­ties in Eng­lish spelling and pro­nun­ci­a­tion. No one now remem­bers the text­book, and the poem might have dis­ap­peared too were it not for efforts of the Sim­pli­fied Spelling Soci­ety, which tracked frag­ments of it through “France, Cana­da, Den­mark, Ger­many, the Nether­lands, Por­tu­gal, Spain, Swe­den and Turkey.”

The poem’s his­to­ry, as told in the Jour­nal of the Sim­pli­fied Spelling Soci­ety (JSSS) in 1994, shows how it trav­eled around Europe, in pieces, con­found­ing and bedev­il­ing aspir­ing Eng­lish speak­ers. Full of homonyms, loan words, and words which—at one time—actually sound­ed the way they’re spelled, the poem’s fifty-eight stan­zas may be the most clever and com­pre­hen­sive “con­cor­dance of caco­graph­ic chaos,” as the JSSS puts it. Admired by lin­guists and his­to­ri­ans of Eng­lish, it has, since its 1994 repub­li­ca­tion, become some­thing of a cult hit for enthu­si­asts of lan­guage every­where.

You can read it here, hear it read above by YouTube’s Lindy­beige, and see a tran­scrip­tion into IPA, the inter­na­tion­al pho­net­ic alpha­bet. Though it’s pop­u­lar­ly rep­re­sent­ed as a kind of sort­ing mech­a­nism for “the Eng­lish-Speak­ing Elite,” that’s hard­ly accu­rate. Eng­lish once sound­ed like this and this, then like this, and now sounds com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent accord­ing to hun­dreds of region­al dialects and accents around the world. The soci­ety ges­tures toward this in their intro­duc­tion, writ­ing, “the selec­tion of exam­ples now appears some­what dat­ed, as do a few of their pro­nun­ci­a­tions. Indeed a few words may even be unknown to today’s read­ers.”

“How many will know what a ‘stud­ding-sail’ is, or that its nau­ti­cal pro­nun­ci­a­tion is ‘stun­sail’?,” asks the JSSS. It seems rea­son­able to won­der how many peo­ple ever did. In any case, Eng­lish, Lindy­beige writes, “is a rapid­ly-chang­ing lan­guage,” and one that has not made much pho­net­ic sense for sev­er­al cen­turies. This is exact­ly what has made it such a bear to learn to spell and pronounce—for both Eng­lish lan­guage learn­ers and native speak­ers. Try your hand at read­ing every word in “The Chaos,” prefer­ably in front of an audi­ence, and see how you do.

via Men­tal Floss/The Poke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Eng­lish Would Sound Like If It Was Pro­nounced Pho­net­i­cal­ly

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Public Domain Day Is Finally Here!: Copyrighted Works Have Entered the Public Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years

in Art, Creativity, Film, History, Literature | January 1st, 2019

Ear­li­er this year we informed read­ers that thou­sands of works of art and enter­tain­ment would soon enter the pub­lic domain—to be fol­lowed every year by thou­sands more. That day is nigh upon us: Pub­lic Domain Day, Jan­u­ary 1, 2019. At the stroke of mid­night, such beloved clas­sics as Robert Frost’s “Stop­ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas” will become the com­mon prop­er­ty of the peo­ple, to be quot­ed at length or in full any­where when the copy­right expires on work pro­duced in 1923. Then, 1924 will expire in 2020, 1925 in 2021, and so on and so forth.

It means that “hun­dreds of thou­sands of books, musi­cal com­po­si­tions, paint­ings, poems, pho­tographs and films” will become freely avail­able to dis­trib­ute, remix, and remake, as Glenn Fleish­man writes at Smith­son­ian. “Any mid­dle school can pro­duce Theodore Pratt’s stage adap­ta­tion of The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray, and any his­to­ri­an can pub­lish Win­ston Churchill’s The World Cri­sis with her own exten­sive anno­ta­tions… and any film­mak­er can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s orig­i­nal The Ten Com­mand­ments.”

Those are just a few ideas. See more exten­sive lists of hits and obscu­ri­ties from 1923 at our pre­vi­ous post and come up with your own cre­ative adap­ta­tions. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are vast and pos­si­bly world chang­ing, in ways both decid­ed­ly good and arguably quite bad. Teach­ers may pho­to­copy thou­sands of pages with­out fear of pros­e­cu­tion; schol­ars may quote freely, artists may find deep wells of inspi­ra­tion. And we may also see “Frost’s immor­tal ode to win­ter used in an ad for snow tires.”

Such crass­ness aside, this huge release from copy­right her­alds a cul­tur­al sea change—the first time such a thing has hap­pened in 21 years due to a 20-year exten­sion of the copy­right term in 1998, in a bill spon­sored by Son­ny Bono at the urg­ing of the Walt Dis­ney com­pa­ny. The leg­is­la­tion, aimed at pro­tect­ing Mick­ey Mouse, cre­at­ed a “bizarre 20-year hia­tus between the release of works from 1922 and 1923.” It is fas­ci­nat­ing to con­sid­er how a gov­ern­ment-man­dat­ed mar­ket­ing deci­sion has affect­ed our under­stand­ing of his­to­ry and cul­ture.

The nov­el­ist Willa Cather called 1922 the year “the world broke in two,” the start of a great lit­er­ary, artis­tic and cul­tur­al upheaval. In 1922, Ulysses by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were pub­lished, and the Harlem Renais­sance blos­somed with the arrival of Claude McKay’s poet­ry in Harlem Shad­ows. For two decades those works have been in the pub­lic domain, enabling artists, crit­ics and oth­ers to bur­nish that notable year to a high gloss in our his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry. In com­par­i­son, 1923 can feel dull.

That year, how­ev­er, marked the film debut of Mar­lene Diet­rich, the pub­li­ca­tion of mod­ernist land­marks like Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway and Jean Toomer’s Cane and far too many more influ­en­tial works to name here. Find sev­er­al more at Duke University’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain,  Life­hack­er, Indiewire, and The Atlantic and have a very hap­py Pub­lic Domain Day.

Pub­lic domain films and books will be added to ever-grow­ing col­lec­tions:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Avalanche of Nov­els, Films and Oth­er Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Pub­lic Domain: Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, William Car­los Williams, Buster Keaton & More

The Library of Con­gress Launch­es the Nation­al Screen­ing Room, Putting Online Hun­dreds of His­toric Films

List of Great Pub­lic Domain Films 

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

in Art | January 1st, 2019

Even in our age of unprece­dent­ed­ly abun­dant images, deliv­ered to us at all times by print, film, tele­vi­sion, and espe­cial­ly the ever-mul­ti­ply­ing forms of dig­i­tal media, some­thing inside us still val­ues paint­ings. It must have to do with their phys­i­cal­i­ty, the phys­i­cal­i­ty of oil on can­vas or what­ev­er tan­gi­ble mate­ri­als the painter orig­i­nal­ly used. But in that great advan­tage of the paint­ing lies the great dis­ad­van­tage of the paint­ing: tan­gi­ble mate­ri­als degrade over time, and many, if not most, of the paint­ings we most revere have been around for a long time indeed, and few of them have come down to us in pris­tine shape.

Enter the art restor­er, who takes on the task of undo­ing, painstak­ing­ly and entire­ly by hand, both the rav­ages of time and the blun­ders of less com­pe­tent stew­ards who have come before. In this case, enter Julian Baum­gart­ner of Chicago’s Baum­gart­ner Fine Art Restora­tion, a med­i­ta­tive short doc­u­men­tary on whose prac­tice we fea­tured ear­li­er this year here on Open Cul­ture.

You can see much more of it in these videos: in the one above, writes Colos­sal’s Kate Sierzputows­ki, Baum­gart­ner “con­dens­es over 40 hours of del­i­cate swip­ing, scrap­ing, and paint retouch­ing into a 11.5 minute nar­rat­ed video” show­ing and explain­ing his restora­tion of The Assas­si­na­tion of Archimedes.

The project, not atyp­i­cal for a paint­ing restora­tion, “involved clean­ing a dark­ened var­nish from the sur­face of the piece, remov­ing the work from its orig­i­nal wood­en pan­el using both mod­ern and tra­di­tion­al tech­niques, mount­ing the thin paper-based paint­ing to acid-free board, and final­ly touch­ing up small areas that had become worn over the years.” Baum­gart­ner’s Youtube chan­nel also offers sim­i­lar con­densed restora­tion videos of two oth­er paint­ings, Moth­er Mary and a por­trait by the Amer­i­can Impres­sion­ist William Mer­rit Chase.

Baum­gart­ner packs into each of these videos an impres­sive amount of knowl­edge about his restora­tion tech­niques, which few of us out­side his field would have had any rea­son to know — or even imag­ine —before. They’ve racked up their hun­dreds of thou­sands of views in part thanks to that intel­lec­tu­al stim­u­la­tion, no doubt, but all these phys­i­cal mate­ri­als and the sounds they make have also attract­ed a crowd that shares a vari­ety of enthu­si­asm unknown before the age of dig­i­tal media. I’m talk­ing, of course, about ASMR video fans, whom Baum­gart­ner has oblig­ed by cre­at­ing a ver­sion of his The Assas­si­na­tion of Archimedes restora­tion espe­cial­ly for them. Now there’s an art restor­er for the 21st cen­tu­ry.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece, The Night Watch, Will Get Restored and You Can Watch It Hap­pen Live, Online

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How Nirvana’s Iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Came to Be: An Animated Video Narrated by T‑Bone Burnett Tells the True Story

in Music | January 1st, 2019

Cred­it­ed with ignit­ing the 90s grunge craze and putting Pacif­ic North­west punk and indie scenes on the map, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” has eclipsed hun­dreds of rock hits as “the most icon­ic song of all time”—at least accord­ing to the ana­lyt­ics of com­put­er sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don.

What­ev­er that des­ig­na­tion means, it’s with­out a doubt the most icon­ic Nir­vana song of all time, a tune whose influ­ence may be impos­si­ble to mea­sure. Kurt Cobain might have grown weary of it, but fans nev­er stopped clam­or­ing for the hit (his mom loved it, too). An anthem for a gen­er­a­tion dis­af­fect­ed with cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing and major label pan­der­ing, “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” is also—like the decade it came to define—a nest­ing doll of irony.

Cobain played this up to a degree—the irony of an indie band announc­ing the sec­ond com­ing of charged DIY punk rock with a song that net­ted them a major label deal and put him on the path to super­star­dom. When Nir­vana debuted their soon-to-be icon­ic hit live at Seattle’s OK Hotel on April 17th, 1991, the usu­al­ly tac­i­turn front­man intro­duced him­self by say­ing, “Hel­lo. We’re major label cor­po­rate rock sell­outs.”

Giv­en his sar­don­ic sense of humor, fans have gen­er­al­ly assumed some kind of anti-cap­i­tal­ist in-joke in the title of the song, with its ref­er­ence to a pop­u­lar brand of deodor­ant. But in a more dra­mat­ic irony, Cobain had no idea when he wrote and record­ed it that “Teen Spir­it was a prod­uct, aimed at teenage girls.” The song’s title, as you’ll learn in the short, ani­mat­ed back­sto­ry in the video above, orig­i­nat­ed with Biki­ni Kill singer Kath­leen Han­na, who scrawled it on Cobain’s wall with a Sharpie after the two shared a night of heavy drink­ing and polit­i­cal­ly right­eous van­dal­ism.

Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett and ani­mat­ed by Drew Christie, the award-win­ning short “Drawn & Record­ed: Teen Spir­it” con­dens­es the song’s sto­ry (which you can read about in more depth here) into two and a half min­utes of pop cul­ture his­to­ry and com­men­tary. Upon wak­ing up and see­ing Hanna’s mes­sage on the wall, Cobain was imme­di­ate­ly flat­tered: “Kurt thought it meant he was a rad­i­cal, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary, a fem­i­nist, a punk, an anti-author­i­tar­i­an, anti-cap­i­tal­ist, anar­chist cru­sad­er.” He got right to work on the song’s cho­rus.

But Han­na main­ly meant to say he lit­er­al­ly smelled like Teen Spir­it, which hap­pened to be the brand of deodor­ant his then-girlfriend—Bikini Kill drum­mer Tobi Vail—used. “I didn’t know that the deodor­ant spray exist­ed until six months after the sin­gle came out,” he told Michael Azer­rad in the biog­ra­phy Come as You Are. He didn’t intend to write an adver­tise­ment, of course. But in yet anoth­er grim twist, “after the song came out,” Bur­nett monot­o­nes, “sales of Teen Spir­it went through the roof.”

The les­son, maybe? “Cap­i­tal­ism is very resilient”? Cobain under­stood this all too well though he may have inad­ver­tent­ly become the last thing he ever want­ed, a prod­uct pitch­man. But his cre­ative mis­read­ing of Han­na’s joke also made music his­to­ry.

Above, you can watch Han­na tell the ori­gin sto­ry her­self. The scene was record­ed at Joes Pub in NYC, back in Decem­ber 2010.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nir­vana Refus­es to Fake It on Top of the Pops, Gives a Big “Mid­dle Fin­ger” to the Tra­di­tion of Bands Mim­ing on TV (1991)

Nir­vana Plays an Angry Set & Refus­es to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it’ After the Crowd Hurls Sex­ist Insults at the Open­ing Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (1991)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Make Orwell Fiction Again

in Current Affairs | January 1st, 2019

Amen to that. Get your hat or shirt here…

via @DavidFrum

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Cov­er of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Cen­sored with Wear and Tear

George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Offi­cial Lan­guage of His Total­i­tar­i­an Dystopia in 1984

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 19 ) |

Haruki Murakami Day: Stream Seven Hours of Mixes Collecting All the Jazz, Classical & Classic American Pop Music from His Novels

in Books, Music | December 31st, 2018

What makes the nov­els of Haru­ki Muraka­mi — orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in Japan­ese and almost unfail­ing­ly filled with some odd but deeply char­ac­ter­is­tic mix­ture of cats, wells, par­al­lel worlds, mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ing women with well-formed ears, and much else besides — so beloved around the world? A large part of it must have to do with Murakami’s cul­tur­al ref­er­ences, some­times Japan­ese but most often west­ern, and even more so when it comes to music. “Almost with­out excep­tion,” writes The Week music crit­ic Scott Mes­low in an exten­sive piece on all the songs and artists name-checked in these nov­els, “Murakami’s musi­cal ref­er­ences are con­fined to one of three gen­res: clas­si­cal, jazz, and Amer­i­can pop.”

Even the very names of Murakami’s books, “includ­ing Nor­we­gian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, and South of the Bor­der, West of the Sun — derive their titles from songs, and his char­ac­ters con­stant­ly reflect on the music they hear.”

You’ll hear all these songs and many more in Mes­low’s three stream­ing mix­es, total­ing sev­en hours of lis­ten­ing, that just this month made up “Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day” on Lon­don-based inter­net radio sta­tion NTS. (We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured NTS here on Open Cul­ture when they put up a twelve-hour “spir­i­tu­al jazz” expe­ri­ence fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock, and many oth­ers, a fair few of whom sure­ly appear in Murakami’s own famous­ly large col­lec­tion of jazz records.)

Haru­ki Muraka­mi begins with Brook Ben­ton’s 1970 bal­lad “Rainy Night in Geor­gia,” the first song Muraka­mi ever includ­ed in a nov­el. In fact, he includ­ed it in his very first nov­el, 1978’s Hear the Wind Sing, which he wrote in the wee hours at his kitchen table after clos­ing up the Tokyo jazz bar he ran in those years before becom­ing a pro­fes­sion­al writer. He even cre­at­ed a radio DJ char­ac­ter, whose voice recurs through­out the nov­el, to announce it and oth­er songs (though his tech­niques for includ­ing his favorite music in his writ­ing have grown some­what sub­tler since). “Okay, our first song of the evening,” the DJ says. “This one you can just sit back and enjoy. A great lit­tle num­ber, and the best way to beat the heat” — or the cold, or what­ev­er the weath­er in your part of the world. Wher­ev­er that is, it’s sure to have plen­ty of Muraka­mi fans who want to lis­ten in.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Became a DJ on a Japan­ese Radio Sta­tion for One Night: Hear the Music He Played for Delight­ed Lis­ten­ers

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A 26-Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Lat­est Nov­el, Killing Com­menda­tore

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Vinyl Col­lec­tion and His Strange Lit­er­ary Worlds

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Computerization, Global Co-operation, Leisure Time & Moon Mining

in Literature, Sci Fi, Science | December 31st, 2018

Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“It’s dif­fi­cult to make pre­dic­tions,” they say, “espe­cial­ly about the future.” The wit­ti­cism has been var­i­ous­ly attrib­uted. If Yogi Berra said it, it’s adorable non­sense, if Mark Twain, dry plain­spo­ken irony. If Niels Bohr, how­ev­er, we have a state­ment that makes us won­der what exact­ly “the future” could mean in a rad­i­cal­ly uncer­tain uni­verse.

If sci­en­tists can’t pre­dict the future, who can? Sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, of course. They may be spec­tac­u­lar­ly wrong at times, but few pro­fes­sion­als seem bet­ter equipped to imag­i­na­tive­ly extrap­o­late from cur­rent conditions—cultural, tech­no­log­i­cal, social, and political—and show us things to come. J.G. Bal­lard, Octavia But­ler, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Von­negut… all have fore­seen many of the mar­vels and dystopi­an night­mares that have arrived since their time.

In 1964, Asi­mov used the occa­sion of the New York World’s Fair to offer his vision of fifty years hence. “What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?” he asked in The New York Times, the ques­tion itself con­tain­ing an erro­neous assump­tion about the dura­bil­i­ty of that event. As a sci­en­tist him­self, his ideas are both tech­no­log­i­cal­ly farsee­ing and con­ser­v­a­tive, con­tain­ing advances we can imag­ine not far off in our future, and some that may seem quaint now, though rea­son­able by the stan­dards of the time (“fis­sion-pow­er plants… sup­ply­ing well over half the pow­er needs of human­i­ty”).

Nine­teen years lat­er, Asi­mov ven­tured again to pre­dict the future—this time of 2019 for The Star. Assum­ing the world has not been destroyed by nuclear war, he sees every facet of human soci­ety trans­formed by com­put­er­i­za­tion. This will, as in the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, lead to mas­sive job loss­es in “cler­i­cal and assem­bly-line jobs” as such fields are auto­mat­ed. “This means that a vast change in the nature of edu­ca­tion must take place, and entire pop­u­la­tions must be made ‘com­put­er-lit­er­ate’ and must be taught to deal with a ‘high-tech’ world,” he writes.

The tran­si­tion to a com­put­er­ized world will be dif­fi­cult, he grants, but we should have things pret­ty much wrapped up by now.

By the year 2019, how­ev­er, we should find that the tran­si­tion is about over. Those who can be retrained and re-edu­cat­ed will have been: those who can’t be will have been put to work at some­thing use­ful, or where rul­ing groups are less wise, will have been sup­port­ed by some sort of grudg­ing wel­fare arrange­ment.

In any case, the gen­er­a­tion of the tran­si­tion will be dying out, and there will be a new gen­er­a­tion grow­ing up who will have been edu­cat­ed into the new world. It is quite like­ly that soci­ety, then, will have entered a phase that may be more or less per­ma­nent­ly improved over the sit­u­a­tion as it now exists for a vari­ety of rea­sons.

Asi­mov fore­sees the cli­mate cri­sis, though he doesn’t phrase it that way. “The con­se­quences of human irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty in terms of waste and pol­lu­tion will become more appar­ent and unbear­able with time and again, attempts to deal with this will become more stren­u­ous.” A “world effort” must be applied, neces­si­tat­ing “increas­ing co-oper­a­tion among nations and among groups with­in nations” out of a “cold-blood­ed real­iza­tion that any­thing less than that will mean destruc­tion for all.”

He is con­fi­dent, how­ev­er, in such “neg­a­tive advances” as the “defeat of over­pop­u­la­tion, pol­lu­tion and mil­i­tarism.” These will be accom­pa­nied by “pos­i­tive advances” like improve­ments in edu­ca­tion, such that “edu­ca­tion will become fun because it will bub­ble up from with­in and not be forced in from with­out.” Like­wise, tech­nol­o­gy will enable increased qual­i­ty of life for many.

… more and more human beings will find them­selves liv­ing a life rich in leisure.

This does not mean leisure to do noth­ing, but leisure to do some­thing one wants to do; to be free to engage in sci­en­tif­ic research. in lit­er­a­ture and the arts, to pur­sue out-of-the-way inter­ests and fas­ci­nat­ing hob­bies of all kinds.

If this seems “impos­si­bly opti­mistic,” he writes, just wait until you hear his thoughts on space col­o­niza­tion and moon min­ing.

The Asi­mov of 1983 sounds as con­fi­dent in his pre­dic­tions as the Asi­mov of 1964, though he imag­ines a very dif­fer­ent world each time. His future sce­nar­ios tell us as much or more about the time in which he wrote as they do about the time in which we live. Read his full essay at The Star and be the judge of how accu­rate his pre­dic­tions are, and how like­ly any of his opti­mistic solu­tions for our seem­ing­ly intractable prob­lems might be in the com­ing year.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Philip K. Dick Makes Off-the-Wall Pre­dic­tions for the Future: Mars Colonies, Alien Virus­es & More (1981)

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopi­an Nov­el Fea­tures a Fascis­tic Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Who Promis­es to “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again”

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |


« Newer Entries | Older Entries »

  • Great Lectures

  • Sign up for Newsletter

  • About Us

    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.


    Advertise With Us

  • Great Recordings

  • Book Lists By

  • Syllabi

  • Favorite Movies

  • Archives

  • Search

    • Quantcast