Back in 1983, the BBC aired Fun to Imagine, a television series hosted by Richard Feynman that used physics to explain how the everyday world works. Here, in language that makes sense to anyone with a basic grounding in science, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist answered questions like, Why can’t tennis balls bounce forever? What are we really seeing when we look in the mirror? And, as shown above, why are rubber bands stretchy? The clip comes from Fun to Imagine, and thanks to this dedicated BBC website, you can watch online all six videos in the series, each running about 12 minutes. (If you have any difficulty viewing them at the BBC, simply watch the all-in-one video below.) But beware, Feynman’s enthusiasm for science is contagious. So watch the clips at your own risk, and be prepared to start playing with bouncy, stretchy things during your free time, hopefully with a big smile on your face.
Some people think Chuck Berry invented rock and roll. Chuck Berry sure thinks so. But I say it was Bo Diddley. At least Diddley invented the rock and roll I love—throbbing, dirty, hypnotic, hovering in some space between the blues, gospel and African rhythms but also with its feet firmly planted on any industrial city streetcorner. Bo Diddley invented irony in rock (his first band was called “The Hipsters”). Bo Diddley never pandered to the teenybopper crowd (though he did go commercial in the 80s). Even his biggest hits have about them an otherworldly air of echo‑y weirdness, with their signature beat and one-note drone. Also something vaguely sleazy and maybe a little sinister, essential elements of rock and roll worthy of the name.
So, as a man who made his own rhythm, his own tones, his own studio, and his own guitar—who was so much his own man that one of his best known songs is named after him—it stands to reason that he would also make his own set of rules for surviving the music business. Called “Bo Diddley’s Guide to Survival,” the list covers all the bases: drugs and booze (“NO!”), food (“anything you can get your hands on”), health, money, defense, cows, women, and hearing. What more is there, really?
The list, clearly part of a magazine feature, has circulated on the internet for some time, but no one has managed to track down the source. It’s probably genuine, though; it sounds like the perfect mix of the down-to-earth and far-out funny that was Bo Diddley. I’m particularly intrigued by his very specific defense techniques (Elvis obviously took notes). It is true, by the way, that Diddley once served as a sheriff in New Mexico, a fact that adds so much to the mystique. Where “Defense” and “Women” get lengthy (and respectful) treatments, his succinct take on “Hearing” is as practical as it gets.
See the original list at the top and read the full transcript below. As you do, listen to the timeless weirdness of “Bo Diddley” above. There’s nothing else like it.
Alcohol and Drugs Only drink Grand Marnier, and that’s to keep the throat from drying up in a place where there’s a lot of smoke. As for drugs: a big NO!
Food Eat anytime, anything you can get your hands on. I mean it!
Health Whenever you get to feeling weird, take Bayer aspirin. I can’t stand taking all that other bullshit.
Money Always take a lawyer with you, and then bring another lawyer to watch him.
Defense I can’t go around slapping people with my hands or else I’d go broke. So I take karate, and kick when I fight. Of course, I got plenty of guns — one real big one. But guns are for people trying to take your home, not some guy who makes you mad. I used to be a sheriff down in New Mexico for two and a half years, so I know not to pull it right away.
Cows If they wanna play, and you don’t wanna make pets out of ‘em, and you can’t eat ‘em — then get rid of ‘em!
Women If you wanna meet a nice young lady, then you try to smell your best. A girl don’t like nobody walking up in her face smelling like a goat. Then, you don’t say crap like “Hey, don’t I know you?” The first thing you ask her is: “Are you alone?” If she tells you that she’s with her boyfriend, then you see if the cat’s as big as you. If you don’t have no money, just smell right. And for God’s sake don’t be pulling on her and slapping on her. You don’t hit the girls! If you do this, you can’t miss.
Hearing Just don’t put your ears in the speakers.
From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, Coronet Instructional Media, that formidable factory of classroom educational films, taught America’s schoolchildren how to study, how to land a job, how to perform their societal and filial duties, how to bathe. Certain generations no doubt retain vivid memories, fond or otherwise, of such 16-millimeter standbys as Good Eating Habits, Joan Avoids a Cold, Are You Popular?and Communism. In 1949, Coronet came up with a short subject rather closer to the eternal interests of the teenager: Dating: Do’s and Don’ts. This twelve-minute film, directed Gilbert Altschul with the assistance of Reuben Hill, Research Professor of Family Life at the University of North Carolina, navigates the garden of forking paths formed by all the choices, from ideally gentleman-like to potentially disastrous, that confront young Woody on his very first date.
Who, for instance, should Woody ask to join him at Central High’s Hi-Teen Carnival? “Whose company would you enjoy?” asks the voice-of-midcentury-authority narrator.” “Well, one thing you can consider is looks. Woody thought of Janice, and how good-looking she was. He really had to rate to date somebody like her.” Still: “It’s too bad Janice always acts so superior and bored. She’d make a fellow feel awkward and inferior.” Perhaps the more grounded Betty? “And yet, it just doesn’t seem as if she’d be much fun. What about Anne? She knows how to have a good time.” Even 64 years on, I daresay fellows would still do well to cleave to the Annes of the world. But given how far the pendulum of sexual politics has swung since Coronet’s heyday, other pieces of of Dating: Do’s and Don’ts advice seems more quaint than current. For a more modern perspective, see also How to Be a “Mr. Good-Date,” a Looney Tunes parody starring Bugs Bunny as the hopeful suitor Reggie Gerandevu and Elmer Fudd as the protective homeowner of whom he runs afoul.
Earlier this month, we highlighted The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics. Featuring films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles and Fellini, this master list came together in 2012 when Sight & Sound(the cinema journal of the British Film Institute) asked contemporary critics and directors to name their 12 favorite movies. Nearly 900 cinephiles responded, and, from those submissions, a meta list of 10 was culled.
So how about something similar for books, you ask? For that, we can look back to 2007, when J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books — writers like Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon. The lists were all compiled in an edited collection, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and then prefaced by one uber list, “The Top Top Ten.”
Zane explained the methodology behind the uber list as follows: “The participants could pick any work, by any writer, by any time period.… After awarding ten points to each first-place pick, nine to second-place picks, and so on, the results were tabulated to create the Top Top Ten List — the very best of the best.”
The short list appears below, along with links to electronic versions of the works (and traditional published editions). There’s one notable exception, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. We couldn’t provide that electronic text, but we do have something special — an audio recording of Nabokov reading a chapter from his controversial 1955 novel.
The texts listed below are permanently housed in our collection of Free eBooks, along with many other classics. In many cases, you’ll find audio versions of the same works in our ever-growing collection of Free Audio Books. If you have questions about how to load files onto your Kindle, please see this related instructional video.
Got an issue with any of the selections? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.
“Gisèle Freund, the German-born photographer who died in 2000 at 91, is both famous and not famous enough,” writes Katherine Knorr in the New York Times. “She was sometimes chagrined to be best known for some of her portraits,” whose luminary subjects included artists, film stars, and writers. At the top, we have Freund’s 1938 shot of James Joyce with his grandson in Paris. Just below, her photograph of a pensive Walter Benjamin from that same year. At the bottom, her 1939 portrait of a smoking Virginia Woolf. (French novelist, theorist and, Minister for Cultural Affairs André Malraux also sported a cigarette in his 1935 portrait by Freund, an image which made it to a postage stamp in 1996, though with his smoke carefully removed.) Former President Jacques Chirac publicly praised Freund’s ability to “reveal the essence of beings through their expressions.” In Woolf’s case, Freund produced the being in question’s first-ever color portrait.
“[Freund] was an early adapter to color, in 1938, and her first exhibition was in fact a projection of color portraits given in Monnier’s book shop,” Knorr writes. She goes on to describe another exhibition, in 2011, that “similarly projects the portraits within its mock bookshop, turning the show into a guessing game since some of those photographed have enormously famous faces,” while others “are a lot of French intellectuals that most young French people today would not recognize.” While we naturally assume that you, as an Open Culture reader, recognize a fair few more French intellectuals than the average gallery-goer, we can’t help but focus on the fact that so many of the writers of whom Freund’s eye saw the definitive images — not just Joyce, Benjamin, and Woolf, but Beckett, Eliot, Hesse, the list goes on — became the defining writers of their era. Freund herself had just one question: “Explain to me why writers want to be photographed like stars,” she wrote, “and the latter like writers.”
In this fun new video from CDZA, guitarist Mark Sidney Johnson takes us on an entertaining romp through more than fifty years of the rock guitar solo, from Chuck Berry to John Mayer.
Along the way Johnson rips through a succession of famous riffs and solos by Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Randy Rhoads, Eddie Van Halen, Slash … and those are only a few from the first half of the video.
Johnson is an English multi-instrumentalist and songwriter based in New York. He works regularly as a session guitarist and plays with The Brit Pack as well as the experimental music video group CDZA, short for Collective Cadenza. For more examples of their offbeat and innovative work, visit the CDZA Web site.
Many things have happened on the internet this week, among them some get off my lawn outrage at a $375 Urban Outfitters leather jacket designed to replicate the homemade swag every punk rock kid once draped over their shoulders. Then there’s the Justin Bieber/Black Flag mash-up t‑shirt that “ruined punk forever.” I may have spent some formative years immersed in ersatz punk and hardcore culture, but no matter how old and cranky I may be compared to the target market of this merchandise, I just can’t bring myself to get bothered. No one has said it better than Dave Berman: “punk rock died when the first kid said / ‘punk’s not dead, punk’s not dead.’”
The strident desire of some to cling to a punk rock ethos can be amusing since the movement’s most famous figureheads, the Sex Pistols, crashed and burned a little over three years after forming and one year after introducing their mascot, Sid Vicious. The band’s creative destruction often seems like the most viable expression of punk. It burns itself out on its own energy. Everything else you can say about it is just more Malcolm McLaren marketing.
Or, put differently, maybe the only discussion worth having about punk rock is archival. It came, it went, get over it—but oh, what a glorious comet trail left by the likes of Johnny Rotten! And we have evidence of the tail end on film. Above, you can see the Pistols very last performance at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January of 1978.
The film opens with text excusing some quality control issues: “The footage contained in this video is rare archive material and irreplaceable. The publishers feel that the quality of the content… far outweighs any minor… shortcomings of sound and vision.” Then we’re off to the races, introduced by a pair of announcers, male and female, like an Olympic event. Despite the disclaimer, this is decent film and audio, and definitely “quality content.” Brilliant, in fact (Sid actually plays!), and an excellent argument for why this band needed no future. A YouTube commenter helpfully breaks down the video into the tracklist below. Great stuff.
01:45 — God Save The Queen , 05:56 — I Wanna Be Me , 10:04 — Seventeen , 12:27 — New York , 15:54 — EMI , 19:38 — Belsen Was Gas , 21:50 — Bodies , 25:50 — Holidays In The Sun , 31:17 — Liar , 35:40 — No Feelings , 38:55 — Problems , 43:26 — Pretty Vacant, 46:57 — Anarchy In The UK , 52:43 — No Fun
There’s nothing funny about the ravages of highly addictive narcotics or gangland turf wars. Nevertheless, Vince Gilligan’s riveting hit Breaking Bad managed to start on a (yes, darkly) comic note that still sounds occasionally as the show hurtles toward its fateful conclusion this Sunday. (Conan O’Brien has had a lot of fun with these moments in parodies of the show’s characters’ quirks and its sometimes-gruesome desert absurdities.)
What anchors the show, even when it veers into gallows humor, is its sense of authenticity. Despite Breaking Bad’s theatrical—almost Shakespearean—plotting, Gilligan and his writers have taken care to build a very believable scaffolding behind every outrageous set piece, even when it comes to the science of perfectionistic chemistry teacher Walter White’s super high-quality crystal methamphetamine. In order to get the science right, Gilligan approached Donna Nelson, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma.
Nelson doesn’t only consult on the nature of illicit chemical compounds; she has also provided the show’s writers with insights into the motivations and methods of chemists and teachers. As Nelson says, “to us who are educated in science, whenever we see science presented inaccurately, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard. It just drives us crazy, and we can’t stay immersed in the show.” As a Breaking Bad fan who is, I’ll be honest, largely chemistry-illiterate, I’d still credit some of my immersion to how real the science feels, a by-product, surely, of how genuine it is. Watch Professor Nelson in the video above, produced by the American Chemical Society, explain how the show created its illusions with the stuff of 100% real science.
Well, okay, it’s maybe more like 96%. As you might have suspected, the signature powder blue color of Walter’s product is pure dramatic invention.
Had he lived during the Inquisition, Thomas Jefferson would have been burned at the stake. His ideas about Jesus and Christianity were far from orthodox. A product of the Enlightenment, Jefferson believed that everything, including religion, should be examined in the light of reason.
When Jefferson examined the Gospels he came away with a strongly divided opinion. “I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence,” he wrote in an 1820 letter to William Short, “and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”
As early as 1804, when he was still president, Jefferson began separating “the diamond from the dunghill,” as he later put it, to assemble his own version of the Bible. He continued the project in earnest during his later years at Monticello, poring over various editions in Greek, Latin, French and King James English. He clipped the passages he thought were genuine teachings of Jesus and pasted them, in the four languages side by side, onto pages.
In 1820 — six years before his death at the age of 83 — Jefferson produced a leather-bound, 84-page volume titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually From the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. Jefferson eliminated everything in the Bible concerning miracles. He ended the Gospel story with the execution and burial of Jesus, omitting the resurrection. The retained passages, Jefferson explained in an 1813 letter to John Adams, contain “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
Today marks the 77th anniversary of Jim Henson’s birth. To celebrate the puppeteer, filmmaker, and Muppet inventor’s life and career, we offer here three of his early short works. Most of us know only certain high-profile pieces of Henson’s oeuvre: The Muppet Show, the Muppet movies, Sesame Street, or perhaps such pictures now much attended on the camp revival circuit as Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. But even by the Muppet Show’s 1974 debut, Henson (1936–1990) had already put in decades developing his distinctive aesthetic of puppets and puppetry. We’ve previously featured the uncharacteristically violent commercials he produced for Wilkins Coffee between 1957 and 1961 and Limbo, the Organized Mind, his seventies trip of a Johnny Carson segment. But unless you count yourself as a serious Henson, fan, you probably haven’t yet seen the likes of Memories, The Paperwork Explosion,and Ripples. Creating each of these shorts, the young Henson collaborated with pianist, jazz composer, and sound engineer Raymond Scott, now remembered as a pioneer in modern electronic music.
The particular sound of Scott, no stranger to scoring cartoons (we’ve by now heard it in everything from Looney Tunes to Ren and Stimpy to The Simpsons), also suited the sorts of visions Henson realized for his various projects of the sixties. Memories, which plunges into a man’s mind as he remembers (with narration by Henson himself) one particularly pleasant afternoon nearly ruined by a headache, appeared in 1967 as a continuation of Henson’s commercial career; the pain reliever Bufferin, you see, literally saved the day. That same year, the commercial (and in form, almost mini-documentary) The Paperwork Explosion illustrates the time- space‑, and labor-saving advantages of IBM’s then-new word-processing system, the MT/ST. Ripples Henson and Scott put together for Montreal’s Expo 1967. It takes place, like Memories and Limbo, inside human consciousness: an architect (Sesame Street writer-producer Jon Stone) drops a sugar cube in his coffee, and its ripples trigger a memory of throwing pebbles into a pond, which itself sends ripples through a host of his other potential thoughts. You’ve got to watch to understand how Henson and Scott pulled this off; conveniently, they only take one minute to do it.
Born 117 years ago today in St. Paul, Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that somewhat louche denizen—some might say inventor—of the “Jazz Age,” has been immortalized as the tender young man we see above: Princeton dropout, writer of The Great Gatsby, boozy companion to beautiful Southern belle flapper Zelda Sayre. Amidst all the glamorization of his best and worst qualities, it’s easy to forget that Fitzgerald was also the father of a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, who went on to have her own successful career as a writer. Unlike the children of some of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, Frances thrived, which must be some testament to her father’s parenting (and to Zelda’s as well, though she allegedly hoped, like Daisy Buchanan, that her daughter would become a “beautiful little fool”).
We get more than a hint of Fitzgerald’s fatherly character in a wonderful little letter that he sent to her in August of 1933, when Frances was away at summer camp. Fitzgerald, renowned for his extremes, counsels an almost Epicurean middle way—distilling, perhaps, hard lessons learned during his decline in the thirties (which he wrote of candidly in “The Crack Up”). He concludes with a list of things for his daughter to worry and not worry about. It’s a very touching missive that I look forward to sharing with my daughter some day. I’ll have my own advice and silly in-jokes for her, but Fitzgerald provides a very wise literary supplement. Below is the full letter, published in the New York Times in 1958. The typos, we might assume, are all sic, given Fitzgerald’s penchant for such errors:
AUGUST 8, 1933 LA PAIX RODGERS’ FORGE TOWSON, MATYLAND
DEAR PIE:
I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy– but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds…
I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?…
Half-wit, I will conclude. Things to worry about:
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