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Friday, March 17th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:42a | David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Theme Song Gets the Seinfeld Treatment 
And, by golly, it works… Related Content: Angelo Badalamenti Reveals How He and David Lynch Composed the Twin Peaks‘ “Love Theme” Watch an Epic, 4-Hour Video Essay on the Making & Mythology of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Available as 78-Card Deck David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recreated in an Adorable Paper Animation David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Theme Song Gets the Seinfeld Treatment is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 2:30p | Tears for Fears Sings “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” with Musician Who Created Divine Dulcimer Version of Their Song
The website Twisted Sifter sets the stage for the delightful video above:
It’s worth noting that Mr. Yoder is a National Hammered Dulcimer champion, and considered by many “the Bela Fleck of the hammered dulcimer.” Over on YouTube you can hear him play dulcimer versions of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite, “Scarborough Fair,” and more. For anyone not familiar with the original 1985 version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” have a listen here.
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| 5:18p | Marshall McLuhan in Two Minutes: A Brief Animated Introduction to the 1960s Media Theorist Who Predicted Our Present
Marshall McLuhan, writes novelist and artist Douglas Coupland, entered the zeitgeist in the 1960s as “a guru or as a villain – as a harbinger of the flowering of culture, or of its death,” a “fuddy-duddy fiftysomething English lit professor from Toronto” whose distinctive research interests and even more distinctive habits of mind empowered him to come up with still-resonant insights into the modern media landscape. He knew “that the point of much of technology, TV, for instance, wasn’t the content of the shows you were watching on it. Rather, what mattered was merely the fact that you were watching TV. The act of analyzing the content of TV – or of other mediums – is either sentimental or it’s beside the point.” The medium, in other words, is the message. That best-known of McLuhan’s prophetic one-liners (on which he expands in the ABC Radio National talk below) remains as true now as it was when it first appeared in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. Coupland emphasizes that different kinds of media, then as now, “force you to favor certain parts of your brain over others,” which we denizens of the 21st century know from intensive daily experience: “that hour you spent on Facebook came at the expense of some other way of using your brain, most likely TV viewing or book-reading, though as books and TV recede, ever more web-mediated activities will replace each other to the point where we’ll have long forgotten what the pre-electronic mind was to begin with.”
Coupland once wrote a kind of biography of McLuhan that distilled the thinker’s life, work, and current relevance into less than 250 pages, but the video at the top of the post, commissioned by Al Jazeera from animator Daniel Savage and narrated by Hong Kong activist Alex Chow, does it in just over two minutes. Chow reminds us that, even today, “if you don’t understand the medium, you don’t fully understand the message,” looking back to the invention of the printing press, and thus of mass media, and how its forms “changed our collective experience. It informed our collective identity, how we imagined ourselves.” In what McLuhan called the “electric environment,” where “everything happens at once. There’s no continuity, there’s no connection, there’s no follow-through. It’s just all now,” we will experience the end of secrecy, and with it “the end of monopolies of knowledge.” 55 years ago, McLuhan wrote that “the next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a salable kind.” As we’ve since discovered, these developments have both their upsides and downsides. But as Coupland writes, consider that passage seriously and “see if it doesn’t give you a chill.” Related Content: The Visionary Thought of Marshall McLuhan, Introduced and Demystified by Tom Wolfe Marshall McLuhan on the Stupidest Debate in the History of Debating (1976) McLuhan Said “The Medium Is The Message”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase Hear Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (1967) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Marshall McLuhan in Two Minutes: A Brief Animated Introduction to the 1960s Media Theorist Who Predicted Our Present is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:30p | Hear Prince’s Personal Playlist of Party Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Party to Life
Many years ago, I took a job as a wedding DJ for a few months to knit ends together in college. Whatever you picture about the job of a wedding DJ, I can assure you that it’s even less glamorous than that. But among the late hours, low pay, and endless schlepping lay at least one pearl-like perk—at every function, when the mood began to ebb along with my sanity, I would put on Prince’s “Controversy,” turn up the speakers as loud as I could, and for the next seven minutes, all would be well. (See him play the song in 1982, above, to a suburban New Jersey audience who resemble my onetime clientele.) For the rest of the night and the rest of the week, I’d be lost in mid-nod to that perfect distillation of funk, the greatest distillation of funk to include the Lord’s Prayer that was ever put to tape. Prince wrote perfect party songs—dozens of them, including the definitive party song, “1999,” which Martin Schneider at Dangerous Minds calls “a supreme signifier for a Sixteen Candles level blowout celebration”… for a certain cohort at least.
An entire mixtape of Prince tunes would do right by any party, but what would the man himself put on? Surely he didn’t just play his own music, although… why not? We do know he kept it raw and funky for Paisley Park gatherings. In a playlist he provided to the TV show The New Girl in 2013 for an episode featuring a fictional Prince party, he opens with the midtempo stomp of The Staples Singers’ 1974 Stax Recording “City in the Sky.” Before long we’re onto the stone cold groove of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” and the dirty funk of Ohio Player’s “Skin Tight” a song about a “bad, bad missus” in “skin tight britches.”
The Prince party playlist (available on Spotify) has just the right mix of erotic, romantic, and spiritual—with the psychedelic funk of Shuggie Otis thrown in, naturally—some of the most finely-tuned soul the seventies produced. One of the latest recordings on the playlist, Chaka Khan’s “I Was Made to Love Him” came out in 1978, the same year as Prince’s first album, so we can take a fairly good guess at what he was listening to when he made his debut. In fact, we might look at the playlist as a snapshot of the funk-rock-soul genius from Minneapolis’ original inspirations, which still resonate like cosmic radiation in his late digital-era recordings. With the Prince vault opened and hundreds of never-before-heard songs set for release, we’ll have years of opportunity to play spot-the-influence. In the meantime, get some people over and put on the mix above. If you sense a lull, drop “Controversy” and watch the most awkward guests come alive with moves they never knew they had. If you need Spotify’s software, you can download it for free here. Related Content: Read Prince’s First Interview, Printed in His High School Newspaper (1976) Prince (RIP) Performs Early Hits in a 1982 Concert: “Controversy,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover” & More The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Comic Book: A New Release Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Prince’s Personal Playlist of Party Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Party to Life is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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