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Monday, May 1st, 2017
- Introduction to Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases – University of Pennsylvania on Coursera – May 1
- Introduction to Philosophy – University of Edinburgh on Coursera – May 1 (7 weeks)
- Entrepreneurship 101: Who is Your Customer? – Massachusetts Institute of Technology on edX – May 2 (2 weeks)
- Ancient Philosophy: Plato & His Predecessors – University of Pennsylvania on Coursera – May 8 (4 weeks)
- An Introduction to Screenwriting – University of East Anglia on FutureLearn – May 8 (2 weeks)
- Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science (part 2) – Harvard University on edX – May 17
- Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative – Vanderbilt University on Coursera – May 22 (7 weeks)
- Japanese Culture Through Rare Books – Keio University on FutureLearn – May 22
| Time | Event |
| 2:30p | The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson: A 5-Part Video Essay on the Auteur of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master, and More
For at least the past decade and a half, each of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies has arrived in theaters as a major cinematic event. By pure chance, I got an especially powerful taste of this a few years ago in Los Angeles when, after a revival screening of The Shining, we in the audience were told to stay right there in our seats for the rest of the night’s surprise double-feature, the second half being Anderson’s as yet unreleased and almost completely unseen The Master — projected in 70-millimeter. Needless to say, nobody left, so palpable was the desire to experience the next phase of the cinematic vision of the auteur who has, to that point, given us Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood.
So what makes Anderson’s cinematic vision so compelling? Video essayist Cameron Beyl, creator of The Directors Series (whose explorations of Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, and the Coen brothers we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture), attempts an answer in this analysis of Anderson’s films, each of whose chapters reflect a chapter of the auteur’s journey to his current prominence. The first of them finds him, at seventeen after a childhood in the San Fernando Valley, shooting a porn-star mockumentary called The Dirk Diggler Story, elements of which would later shape his 1997 porn-industry epic Boogie Nights. Having ditched film school after just two days, the slightly older Anderson set out to make Cigarettes & Coffee, a short tale of low life told in high style that would expand into his first feature, the mistreated but rediscovered Hard Eight.
Beyl’s miniseries of video essays, which runs nearly three hours in total, continues from Anderson’s early Sundance success (a success that did much to raise the profile of the festival itself) to his much larger-budget “California chronicles” Boogie Nights and Magnolia, his “concept comedies” Punch-Drunk Love and various other shorts made at the time, his “portraits of power” There Will Be Blood and The Master, and his ascent to “higher states” in the Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice and the documentary Junjun.
Beyl describes Anderson as undeniably “born to be a filmmaker,” and so it stands to reason that, though his favorite themes including family, power, and sexual dysfunction remain constant, each new phase of the director’s life results in a new phase in his filmmaking — or indeed, the other way around. And so everyone who takes film seriously eagerly awaits his next chapter.
Related Content: The Hidden Secrets in “Daydreaming,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Radiohead Music Video Two Short Films on Coffee and Cigarettes from Jim Jarmusch & Paul Thomas Anderson Discover the Life & Work of Stanley Kubrick in a Sweeping Three-Hour Video Essay 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. The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson: A 5-Part Video Essay on the Auteur of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master, and More 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.  |
| 5:39p | Montblanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink
And what’s a pen without ink? It’s blue, of course. Get a close up view of that here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead in 1970: Hear the Complete Recordings Montblanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink 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. |
| 6:54p | 700 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in May: Enroll Free Today
FYI: This month, 700 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will be getting underway, giving you the chance to take courses from top flight universities, at no cost. With the help of Class Central, we’ve pulled together a complete list of May MOOCS. Below, find a few courses that piqued our interest, or rummage through the list and find your own. Note: The trailer for Introduction to Philosophy is featured above. View the complete list of MOOCS here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. 700 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in May: Enroll Free Today 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. |
| 8:00p | An Aging Louis Armstrong Sings “What a the Wonderful World” in 1967, During the Vietnam War & The Civil Rights Struggle
It’s not uncommon to have a knee jerk response to Bob Thiele and George David Weiss’ now-ubiquitous “What a Wonderful World.” The quality of your reaction is likely determined by your worldview. A misty-eyed bride-to-be browsing tunes for her upcoming reception’s father-daughter dance will not be coming at things from the same angle as the directors of Bowling for Columbine, Good Morning, Vietnam, and—unexpectedly—Madagascar. The first version, sung by an aging Louis Armstrong, remains definitive, though it was dismissed at first by record execs, who hoped for another rollicking chart topper along in the “Hello, Dolly!” model. As Jack Doyle notes on the Pop History Dig, Armstrong dug the song, and performed it often, hoping to strike a chord of hope and optimism during a period of great civil unrest: Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That’s the secret… The song’s white authors shared his view, and hoped his crossover appeal would promote feelings of racial harmony on all sides of the record-buying public. It was a hit in the UK, but a slow starter in the US, not really catching on until its appearance on Good Morning, Vietnam‘s soundtrack (1987). Half a century after its release, “What a Wonderful World” has entered the pantheon, as anyone with a television and ears can attest. Its simple lyrics involving roses, rainbows, and babies have resulted in a number of hideously syrupy covers. With so many choices, it’s almost impossible to pick a least-favorite. Their gooeyness does a disservice to the power of the original. What’s so poignant about the performance, above, are the moments where the darkness cuts through the treacle, ever so briefly. Check out Armstrong’s expressions at :25, :50, and 1:49, and interpret it how you will. It’s worth noting that the nightly news was monopolized by reports of the war in Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights at home. Armstrong’s health was in decline. The realities of his own New Orleans childhood were far more complex than the crayon-bright vision painted by the lyrics. A montage of bombings and peaceful demonstrators being stomped underfoot would’ve seemed premature at such an early stage in the song’s history, so Armstrong smiled through, as he laid the groundwork for later performers’ layered interpretations. Some of the ones we find most compelling are below:
Nick Cave & the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan unhappiness has them reeling off their stools, even as they shake hands to comic effect.
Ministry’s sinister take opens with a lovely lonely piano that, like the listener’s eardrums, gets plowed under by a massive attack of industrial noise.
Joey Ramone had already been diagnosed with the cancer that cut his life short when he recorded his version, that ends on a note of unabashed pop-punk joy. Related Content: The Cleanest Recordings of 1920s Louis Armstrong Songs You’ll Ever Hear “What a Wonderful World,” Louis Armstrong’s Classic, Performed with Traditional Chinese Instruments Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. An Aging Louis Armstrong Sings “What a the Wonderful World” in 1967, During the Vietnam War & The Civil Rights Struggle 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. |
| 8:30p | Why Should We Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (and Finish It)? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel of Russia in the Napoleonic wars, has for some time borne the unfortunate, if mildly humorous, cultural role as the ultimate unread doorstop. (At least before David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.) The daunting length and complexity of its narrative can seem uniquely forbidding, though it’s equaled or exceeded in bulk by the books of early English novelist Samuel Richardson or later masterworks by the German Robert Musil and French Marcel Proust (not to mention the 8,000 page, 27-volume roman Men of Goodwill by Jules Romains.) But where it may be necessary in certain circles to have a working knowledge of À la recherche du temps perdu’s “madeleine moment,” one needn’t have read every volume of the painstaking work to get the main flavor for this reference. Tolstoy’s novel, on the other hand, is all of a piece, an operatic text of so many disparate threads that it’s nearly impossible to follow only one of them. And “anyone who tells you that you can skip the ‘War’ parts and only read the ‘Peace’ parts is an idiot,” writes Philip Hensher at The Guardian. (Now he tells me….) Hensher also swears one can read War and Peace “in 10 days maximum.” Very likely, if you approach it without fear or prejudice, and take some vacation time. (But “could you read War and Peace in a week,” Tim Dowling teased in those same pages?) Tolstoy’s massive psychological portrait of Tsarist Russia in thrall to the French emperor remains a cornerstone of world, and of course, Russian literature. Without it, there may have been no Doctor Zhivago or August 1914. “War and Peace is a long book, sure,” concedes the TED-Ed video above from Brendan Pelsue, “but it’s also a thrilling examination of history, populated with some of the deepest, most realistic characters you’ll find anywhere.” Like most hulking novels of the period, the book was originally serialized in a magazine—the pre-HBO means of disseminating compelling drama—but Tolstoy had not intended for it to grow to such a length or take up five years of his life. One story—that of the Decembrists—led to another. Grand, sweeping views of history emerged from examinations of “the small lives that inhabit those events.” Pelsue makes a persuasive rhetorical case, but also—for most type-A, over-employed, or highly distractible readers, at least—inadvertently makes the counterargument. There are no main characters in the book. No Anna Karenina or Ivan Ilyich to follow from start to bitter end. “Instead, readers enter a vast interlocking web of relationships and questions” about the nature of love and war. Maybe you’ve already got one of those—like—in all the time you spend not reading novels. So (snaps fingers), what’s the payoff? The upshot? The “madeline moment”? (No offense to Proust.) Well, no one can—or should attempt to—summarize a complex literary work in such a way that we don’t need to read it for ourselves. Nor, can any interpretation be in any way definitive. To his credit Pelsue doesn’t try for anything of the kind. Instead, he offers up Tolstoy’s “large, loose baggy monster,” in Henry James’ famously dismissive phrase, not as a novel, nor, as Tolstoy countered, an epic poem or historical chronicle, but as a distinctly Russian form of literature and “the sum total of Tolstoy’s imaginative powers, and nothing less.” A blurb that needs some work? We’re only going to miss the point unless we meet the work itself, whether we read it over 10 days or 10 years. The same can be said for so many epic works that lazy people like… well, all of us at times… complain about. There is absolutely no substitute for reading Moby Dick from start to finish at least twice, I’ve told people with such conviction they’ve rolled their eyes, snorted, and almost kicked me, but I haven’t myself been able to digest all of War and Peace, nor even pretended to. Tolstoy’s greatest work has sadly come to most of us as a book it’s perfectly okay to skim (or watch the movie). It’s a frustrating work, sometimes boring and disagreeable, didactic and annoying. It has “the worst opening sentence of any major novel,” opines Philip Hensher, and “the very worst closing sentence by a country mile.” And it is also perhaps, “the best novel ever written—the warmest, the roundest, the best story and the most interesting.” Tolstoy not only entertains, but he accomplishes his intention, argues Alain de Botton, of increasing his readers’ “emotional intelligence.” I wouldn’t take anyone’s word for it. We are free to reject Tolstoy, as Tolstoy himself rejected Shakespeare, calling the veneration of the Bard “a great evil.” But we’d have to read him first. There must be some good reasons why people who have actually read War and Peace to the end refuse to let the rest of us forget it. Related Content: Watch War and Peace: The Splendid, Epic Film Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Novel (1969) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Why Should We Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (and Finish It)? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case 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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