Yes, you read correctly: there exists a piece of theater whose production brought together three of the most ardently-followed, iconoclastic creators of recent decades. First staged in 1990 at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets appeared as the fruit of multidisciplinary labor from renowned avant-garde director Robert Wilson, best known for extra-long-form productions like Einstein on theBeach, created with Philip Glass;raggedly American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a musician with no small theatrical bent himself; and William S. Burroughs, writer of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and other texts that have blown away generations of counterculturally inclined reading minds. They based their tale of a hapless young file clerk in love and his fateful pact with the devil on the German folktale-cum-opera Der Freischütz. Hence the work’s premiere in Germany, and the German dialogue in the television version of the full production above.
But worry not, non-Germanophones; the Waits-composed songs remain in English, and as with anything directed by Wilson, you buy the ticket as much to a striking pure visual experience as to anything else. You can hear and see more from Waits and Wilson about what went into The Black Rider in the half-hour TV documentary just above. (The narrator may speak German, but everyone else involved speaks English.) For a pure musical experience of The Black Rider, pull up Waits’ eponymous album, released in 1993. (See also the bootleg The Black Rider Outtakes.) And now, with twenty years’ distance from The Black Rider’s American debut, maybe we can put the question to ourselves of whether it counts as a streak of poor taste or a stroke of artistic genius to have Burroughs, of all people, pen his own version of a story that — spoiler alert — ends with the protagonist fated to shoot his own bride.
Next year marks the 40th anniversary of a modern classic, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. And surely no other film has even come close to making the construction of an aqueduct so thrilling.
For sure, the sizable servings of incest, corruption, and greed help carry Robert Towne’s brilliant screenplay. But under Towne’s script are the bones of another story, the story of an engineering feat that eclipsed the Panama Canal. Yes we’re talking about the building of the great Los Angeles aqueduct starting in 1908.
In the preface to the script Towne wrote this, “the great crimes in California have been committed against the land—and against the people who own it and future generations. It was only natural that the script should evolve into the story of a man who raped the land and his own daughter.”
Towne didn’t worry about sticking to the facts (he set the action of Chinatown in the 1930s—an inherently more glamorous period, especially in Los Angeles). Some even argue that the film creates an entirely different (and wrong) history of the project that is remembered as fact.
It’s been all over the news recently: two Swedish design students, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin, have created what they call an “invisible bike helmet.” This description is a little misleading. The Hövding, as it’s been branded, is not invisible so much as it’s contained, in a puffy, high tech collar, as an airbag that deploys upon impact and protects the wearer from the typical head trauma cyclists suffer in accidents.
Working with a head trauma specialist and staging accidents to collect movement patterns, Haupt and Alstin defiantly took on what they saw as a male-dominated design establishment. “Easy,” they say, “it only took us seven years.” They raised ten million dollars and pushed forward with a certain amount of Scandinavian bravado. The short doc above opens with a few quotes from the pair. “We’re going to save the world,” they tell us, “it’s chicken to be a realist.” Upon seeing their design, they say, a professor remarked (in English), “I have to sit down… you’re going to be millionaires.”
Haupt and Alstin’s bombast is seductive, but the product may not live up to the hype quite yet. As Tech Crunch reported last year, “Hövding costs $600 and only works once. There’s also been some complaints about the design and an early version had trouble with the zipper.” Nonetheless, it’s still an amazing invention that will only improve with future real world testing. At present, it could save the lives of those well-heeled cyclists who can’t stand to wear clunky, traditional bike helmets. In Europe, at least, where the helmet is currently for sale and safety approved.
The video above was made by director Fredrik Gertton, who has successfully Kickstarted an advocacy film he calls Bikes Vs. Cars that seems well worth a look for those concerned about the future of urban transportation.
Few science fiction novels have resonated as strongly with popular culture as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The book, wherein the first trickles of Internet culture coalesced into the gritty film noir world so dear to readers of Philip K. Dick, became one of the seminal reads of the 1980s. The cyberpunk genre was born.
Since its appearance, Gibson’s work has continuously echoed in popular culture. While movies have tried to distill his impending, tech-filled dystopianism, the most appropriate, if not the most striking tributes, have come in the form of video games. From 1993’s Shadowrun, to the somber mix of conspiracy and technology of the Deus Ex trilogy, video games were inherently suited to the visual portrayal of cyberpunk. The most ambitious of these was spearheaded by one of counterculture’s most prominent proponents: Dr. Timothy Leary.
Leary is best known as the psychologist who championed LSD and psilocybin use, engaging in meticulous research—both personal and professional—of their effects. By the 1980s, the same Leary who had popularized the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” was now proselytizing computer use with the phrase “turn on, boot up, jack in.” To those who doubted his about-face, Leary declared, “the PC is the LSD of the 1990s.”
In addition to having created several transcendental computer games of his own design (a version of Mind Mirror, where players improve their personalities, sold 65,000 copies under Electronic Arts, and is available on Facebook), Leary had plans to build a formidable version of Neuromancer. As you can see in this clip, he was an ardent Gibson fan; not surprising, considering the self-betterment that emerged from the fusion of technology and humanity in Gibson’s work.
In the clip above, the New York Public Library’s Donald Mennerich discusses his archival work on Leary’s unfinished game, which was recently unearthed by Leary’s estate. Although he had made little headway, Leary had a grandiose design for his “mind movie:” Devo would handle the music, Keith Haring would take care of the visuals, and Helmut Newton would include his photography. Two characters were based on Grace Jones and David Byrne. The story was to be written by Leary, alongside William S. Burroughs.
While Leary’s Neuromancer failed to materialize, a version of the game was later made by Interplay. Although most of the big names had dropped off the roster, Devo’s “Some Things Never Change” was still used as the theme. And, while Leary’s oeuvre lies in the archives, the gameplay from Interplay’s version, seen here, is still good for a hit of ‘80s nostalgia.
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, period. So I take it very seriously. But when I see the animated sheet music of the first cut, “So What,” I can’t help but think of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons, and their Vince Guaraldi compositions. I mean no offense to Miles. His modal jazz swings, and it’s fun, as fun to listen to as it is to watch in rising and falling arpeggios. The YouTube uploader, Dan Cohen, gives us this on his channel Animated Sheet Music, with apologies to Jimmy Cobb for the lack of drum notation.
Also from Cohen’s channel, we have Charlie Parker’s music animated. Never one to keep up with his admin, Parker left his estate unable to recuperate royalties from compositions like “Confirmation” (above).
Nonetheless, everyone knows it’s Bird’s tune, and to see it animated above is to see Parker dance a very different step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with complex melodic paragraphs instead of chordal phrases.
And above, we have John Coltrane’s massive “Giant Steps,” with its rapid-fire bursts of quarter notes, interrupted by half-note asides. Coltrane’s iconic 1960 composition displays what Ira Gitler called in a 1958 Downbeat piece, “sheets of sound.” Gitler has said the image he had in his head was of “bolts of cloth undulating as they unfurled,” but he might just as well have thought of sheets of rain, so multitude and heavy is Coltrane’s melodic attack.
See Cohen’s Animated Sheet Music channel for two more Charlie Parker pieces, “Au Privave” and “Bloomdido.”
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!
In 1955, a mere two months into eighth grade, a 15-year-old teenager dropped out of a Leningrad school. He had already repeated seventh grade; the thought of another boring year was unbearable. He wandered into work at a factory, but only lasted six months. For the next seven years, he drifted in and out of menial jobs at a lighthouse, a crystallography lab, and a morgue. For a time, he worked as a manual laborer on geological expeditions and as a stoker at a public bathhouse. Still, it wasn’t a wholly inauspicious start—by the end of his life, he had taught at Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, Michigan, and Mount Holyoke. He had also been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Despite spurning his own formal education, Russian poet and Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky immediately rose to the highest academic echelon when he arrived in America in 1972. By all accounts, the autodidact held his classes to a high standard, frequently dismissing any student arguments about literary greatness unless they centered on Milosz, Lowell, or Auden.
Monica Partridge, a former student in his class, told Open Culture, “I took a poetry class with [Joseph Brodsky] at Mount Holyoke College my freshman year… It was all 19th [century] Russian poetry, and he would give us four pages of poems to memorize overnight. We would have to come in the next [morning] and transcribe the poems we had memorized. Very Russian.”
No less impressive was the list of books that Brodsky distributed to Partridge’s class.
1. Bhagavad Gita
2. Mahabharata
3. Gilgamesh
4. The Old Testament
5. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
6. Herodotus: Histories
7. Sophocles: Plays
8. Aeschylus: Plays
9. Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)
10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
11. Plato: Dialogues
12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima
13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology
14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]
16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics
17. Tacitus: Annals
18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores
19. The New Testament
20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
22. Catullus: Poems
23. Horace: Poems
24. Epictetus: Discourses
25. Aristophanes: Plays
26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals
27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica
28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers
29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
30. Plotinus: The Enneads
31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History
32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy
33. Pliny the Younger: Letters
34. Byzantine verse romances
35. Heraclitus: Fragments
36. St. Augustine: Confessions
37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers
39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince
40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)
41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle
42. Icelandic sagas
43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)
44. François Rabelais
45. Francis Bacon
46. Martin Luther: Selected Works
47. John Calvin: Institutio Christianae religionis
48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. René Descartes: Discourses
51. Song of Roland
52. Beowulf
53. Benvenuto Cellini
54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams
55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées
57. John Milton: Paradise Lost
58. John Donne
59. Andrew Marvell
60. George Herbert
61. Richard Crashaw
62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises
63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard
64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
67. Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters
68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government
69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics
71. David Hume: Everything
72. The Federalist Papers
73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments
75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed
76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey
78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis
80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico
81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude
82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies
83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power
“Shortly after the class began, he passed out a handwritten list of books that he said every person should have read in order to have a basic conversation,” Partridge writes on the Brodsky Reading Group blog. “At the time I was thinking, ‘Conversation about what?’ I knew I’d never be able to have a conversation with him, because I never thought I’d ever get through the list. Now that I’ve had a little living, I understand what he was talking about. Intelligent conversation is good. In fact, maybe we all need a little more.”
The Beatles’ Revolver has garnered some of the highest praises rock critics can offer. But not everyone loved the record when it came out. In a 1966 issue of Disc and Music Echomagazine, the Kinks’ Ray Davies wrote a snarky, unsparing review of the album, tackling each song in a few sentences. In high contrast to the current sentiments of Rolling Stone or Allmusic, Davies only seems to have liked a few tracks, and those the most traditionally upbeat: He called “I’m Only Sleeping,” “a most beautiful song” and “the best track on the album.” He also quite liked “Good Day Sunshine,” writing “this is back to the real old Beatles. I just don’t like the electronic stuff. The Beatles were supposed to be like the boy next door only better.” And “Here There and Everywhere” Davies calls the “third best track on the album.”
That’s mostly the end of Davies’ felicity. His review savages some of the most popular songs on the record. Of “Eleanor Rigby” he writes. “it sounds like they’re out to please music teachers in primary schools.” The best he can bring himself to say of the track is that “it’s very commercial.” “Yellow Submarine,” Davies writes, “is a load of rubbish, really.” And his take on the trippy “Tomorrow Never Knows” cuts the song’s ambitions down to size: “Listen to all those crazy sounds! It’ll be popular in discotheques. I can imagine they had George Martin tied to a totem pole when they did this.” Maybe the cranky Davies was motivated by professional jealousy; maybe he’s one of the most honest reviewers of the record—his take uncolored by starstruckness. Who knows? He does admit that it’s “the first Beatles LP I’ve really listened to in its entirety.” Read Davies’ full review here.
Every time I’ve taught George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on misleading, smudgy writing, “Politics and the English Language,” to a group of undergraduates, we’ve delighted in pointing out the number of times Orwell violates his own rules—indulges some form of vague, “pretentious” diction, slips into unnecessary passive voice, etc. It’s a petty exercise, and Orwell himself provides an escape clause for his list of rules for writing clear English: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But it has made us all feel slightly better for having our writing crutches pushed out from under us.
Orwell’s essay, writes the L.A. Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik, “stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Where Twain’s essay takes on a pretentious academic establishment that unthinkingly elevates bad writing, “Orwell makes the connection between degraded language and political deceit (at both ends of the political spectrum).” With this concise description, Hiltzik begins his list of Orwell’s five greatest essays, each one a bulwark against some form of empty political language, and the often brutal effects of its “pure wind.”
One specific example of the latter comes next on Hiltzak’s list (actually a series he has published over the month) in Orwell’s 1949 essay on Gandhi. The piece clearly names the abuses of the imperial British occupiers of India, even as it struggles against the canonization of Gandhi the man, concluding equivocally that “his character was extraordinarily a mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad.” Orwell is less ambivalent in Hiltzak’s third choice, the spiky 1946 defense of English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse, whose behavior after his capture during the Second World War understandably baffled and incensed the British public. The last two essays on the list, “You and the Atomic Bomb” from 1945 and the early “A Hanging,” published in 1931, round out Orwell’s pre- and post-war writing as a polemicist and clear-sighted political writer of conviction. Find all five essays free online at the links below. And find some of Orwell’s greatest works in our collection of Free eBooks.
The world tends to think rather loosely about the concepts of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the motion picture industry, throwing them around, running them together, naming one when they mean another — still, nothing a bracing splash of Charles Bukowski can’t sort out. Above, the famous Los Angeles-resident poet, a figure as shambolically glorious and stealthily inspiring as much of the city itself, gives a brief back-seat tour of Hollywood. No, he doesn’t take us past the movie studios, nor the Walk of Fame, nor the site of Schwab’s Pharmacy. He stays closer to home — his home, the storied bungalow at 5124 De Longpre Avenue. We see his neighborhood, his neck of Hollywood, the northwestern district of vast Los Angeles that contains much less of the capital‑I Industry than you’d think, but more of genuine (if often grotesque) interest.
“That’s a lady fortune teller there,” Bukowski says, gesturing toward one of the modest houses around him. “I went in there one time. She read my palm. She said, ‘You’re an alcoholic.’ ‘Really? Do I gamble, too?’ ‘Yes, you gamble. That’ll be five dollars.’ ” The driver continues down Hollywood’s eponymous boulevard, passing Western Avenue, which gets the poet remembering more: “There used to be cement benches out front, and all the insane people would sit there. The street people. They’d talk to each other all day long.” We pass important landmarks as well: “There’s the old Sex Shop. Keeps changing hands.” He even points out the wheelers and dealers living amid this stretch of bars, brothels, and burger stands: “There’s a woman who’s not a hooker. There’s a dope dealer.” Give me Bukowski’s Hollywood tour over those double-decker buses you see around town, their conductors barking about minor celebrity sightings, any day. “I’ve been to this liquor store many a time,” Bukowski notes. “Many a time.”
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!
Domino magicians “Hevesh5” and “Millionendollarboy” teamed up to create a pretty epic domino rally. It took 3 months and 25,000 dominoes to make the video you’re watching above. Actually you’re really watching two videos in one. The first part was made by Hevesh5 in the US. Then, at the 1:35 mark, it switches to millionendollarboy’s segment created in Germany. It’s amazing to watch the domino structures come down. A little more amazing to think about them going up. Enjoy.
Pshaw! As she’s very likely aware, there’s not a thing wrong with her dancing. If there were, I doubt she’d be sporting saucy hot pants in the above video for the first single off of the Plastic Ono Band’s Take Me to the Land of Hell.
Her 80-year-old stems are in fantastic shape. Mayhaps this youthful vibe is a reflection of the company she keeps. A bunch of nifty pals from Generations X and Y showed up to shake their tail feathers on camera—the surviving Beastie Boys (who also produced), Reggie Watts, Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, gender-bending performer Justin Vivian Bond, and public radio star Ira Glass, to name but a few.
Apparently, she’s not quite as tight with all her dance partners as the video would imply. Glass describes his involvement thusly:
She’s gracious, has to be reminded by a handler who in the world I am. Then totally acts nice, says something along the lines of “I appreciate the work you do” which either means she’s heard my work or she hasn’t…. The song is called “Bad Dancer” so I’m the perfect participant because—though I love to dance, I have no illusions. I’m a spaz. I stand in front of the camera and 20 handlers and hipsters and publicists and crew and Yoko Ono and I think a reporter from Rolling Stone and I tell myself to pretend I can do this and I dance.
Perhaps declaring herself a Bad Dancer is Ono’s way of encouraging self-conscious wall huggers to drop their inhibitions and join in the fun. It’s an approach to life, and aging, that made a cult classic of Harold and Maude.
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.
