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Wednesday, October 11th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 6:27a | 90,000 Fans Sing “I Won’t Back Down” at University of Florida Football Game: A Goosebump-Inducing Tribute to Tom Petty
Tom Petty grew up in Gainesville, Florida, in the backyard of the University of Florida. On Saturday, during a football game against LSU, some 90,000 Gators fans gave Petty a raucous send off, singing "I Won't Back Down" in unison. Don't know about you, but it gave me the chills. BTW, if you're wondering what the occasional boos are all about, it's the U. of Florida fans taking the LSU marching band to task for disrupting the Petty sing-along. Or so it was perceived. Related Content: Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft Prince, Joined by Tom Petty, Plays a Mind-Blowing Guitar Solo On “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” 90,000 Fans Sing “I Won’t Back Down” at University of Florida Football Game: A Goosebump-Inducing Tribute to Tom Petty 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.  |
| 8:00a | The Existential Philosophy of Cowboy Bebop, the Cult Japanese Anime Series, Explored in a Thoughtful Video Essay
Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Neon Genesis Evangelion — these are the kind of titles that might ring a bell even if you have no particular interest in futuristic Japanese animated television shows. But how about Cowboy Bebop? That evocatively Western name itself, not an awkward English translation of a Japanese title but English in the original, hints that the series stands apart from all the dimension fortresses, mobile suits, and neon geneses out there. And indeed, when it first aired in 1997, viewers the world over took quick note of the distinctive sensibility of its stories of a shipful of bounty hunters drifting through outer space in the year 2071. "On paper, Cowboy Bebop, the legendary cult anime series from Shinichirō Watanabe" — recently director of one of Blade Runner 2049's short prequels — "reads like something John Wayne, Elmore Leonard, and Philip K. Dick came up with during a wild, all-night whiskey bender." So writes the Atlantic's Alex Suskind in a piece on the show's lasting legacy. "Everyone speaks like they’re background extras in Chinatown. The show ultimately features so many cross-ranging influences and nods to other famous works it’s almost impossible to keep track. It’s Sergio Leone in a spacesuit. It’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with automatic weapons." And yet Cowboy Bebop remains, thoroughly, a work of Japanese imagination, and like many of the most respected of the form, it has serious philosophical inclinations. Channel Criswell creator Lewis Bond examines those in "The Meaning of Nothing," his video essay on the series. "Can we as humans find something in nothing, find purpose beyond survival?" Bond asks. "These ontological thoughts that plague us make up the same existential drift our characters repeatedly find themselves in, and it's what is most significant to the journey of Cowboy Bebop." He looks past the cooler-than-cool style, snappy dialogue, witty gags, and rich, unexpected mixture of aesthetic influences to which fans have thrilled to find "a metaphysical expression of how people overcome their lives, particularly the lingering grief that comes with them." Taken as a whole, the show resolves into a presentation of life as "less of a linear path towards a goal, more of a haze that we must venture through without any guidance, because the sad reality of Bebop's story is that our cast of characters are lost in the cosmos without any justification for why they live, other than to exist." The series came to a famously ambiguous end after 26 episodes, but this past summer we heard that it may return, rebooted as a live-action series. Whatever its medium, the world of Cowboy Bebop — with its spacecraft, its interplanetary cops and robbers, and its superintelligent corgi — amounts to nothing less than the human condition, a place we have no choice but to revisit. Might as well do it in style. The complete Cowboy Bebop series can be bought on blu-ray, or if you're a subscriber, you can watch the episodes on Hulu. Related Content: Watch the New Anime Prequel to Blade Runner 2049, by Famed Japanese Animator Shinichiro Watanabe How the Films of Hayao Miyazaki Work Their Animated Magic, Explained in 4 Video Essays Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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. The Existential Philosophy of <i>Cowboy Bebop</i>, the Cult Japanese Anime Series, Explored in a Thoughtful Video Essay 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. |
| 11:00a | The History of Hip Hop Music Visualized on a Turntable Circuit Diagram: Features 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West
Every genre of music has its lineages and filiations, and each generation tries to outdo its predecessors. In no genre of music are these relationships so clearly defined as in hip-hop, where good-natured battles, furious beefs, nostalgic tributes, and guest appearances explicitly connect rappers from different eras, cities, and styles. Since the earliest days of hip-hop, groups have formed crews and loose alliances, built their own labels and media empires together, and defined the sounds of their region. At the center of it all was the turntable, which founding fathers like Kool DJ Herc repurposed from consumer playback machines to electronic instruments and proto-samplers. No matter how far the music has come in its sophisticated adaptations of digital studio technology, hip-hop’s essential architecture came from the meeting of two turntables, a mixer, and a microphone.
Paying homage to that humble origin, the Hip-Hop Love Blueprint by design house Dorothy takes the circuit diagram of a turntable as the basis for a map connecting 700 of hip-hop’s major players, from godfathers like Cab Calloway, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets, to originators like Herc and Grandmaster Flash, golden age heroes like Run-DMC and Eric B. and Rakim, political artists like Public Enemy and KRS-One, West Coast giants like N.W.A. and Dr. Dre, underground and indie rappers, turntablists and star producers, and everything in-between. Contemporary stars like Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Jay-Z, and Kanye appear, as, of course, do the martyred icons Biggie and Tupac. The Beastie Boys, De La Soul, Eminem, Nas, Jurassic 5, J Dilla, Mos Def, MF Doom, Kook Keith, Run the Jewels… you name ‘em, they’ve probably made the cut. The diagram--viewable online for free, and purchasable for £35.00--even features the names of early breakdancers like the Rock Steady Crew and graffiti artists like Lady Pink and Futura 2000.
As in earlier such charts from Dorothy, like Alternative Love and Electric Love, fans may find fault with the placement of certain figures and groups, and with the choice of emphasis. Rap abounds in masculine bravado—and at times no small amount of misogyny—but it should go without saying that female stars like Salt ‘n’ Pepa, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott, and Lauryn Hill are as influential as many of the biggest male names on the chart. Yet not one of them gets top billing, so to speak, here. This unfortunate fact aside, Hip-Hop Love does a very impressive job of cataloguing and connecting the most commercially successful, big-name artists with some of the most underground and experimental. Though we associate artists with particular regions—Outkast epitomizes the South, for example, Wu-Tang Clan is New York to the core—the blueprint pulls them all together, reaching out even to UK grime and trip-hop, in a schematic that resembles one huge, interconnected electric city. You can get your own copy of the poster online here.
Related Content: Enter the The Cornell Hip Hop Archive: A Vast Digital Collection of Hip Hop Photos, Posters & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The History of Hip Hop Music Visualized on a Turntable Circuit Diagram: Features 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West 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. |
| 2:00p | Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright
Though he eventually disappeared from the public eye, Syd Barrett did not fade into obscurity all at once after his "erratic behavior," as Andy Kahn writes at JamBase, "led to his leaving" Pink Floyd in 1968. The founding singer/songwriter/guitarist went on in the following few years to write, record, and even sporadically perform new solo material, appearing on John Peel’s BBC show in 1970 and giving a long Rolling Stone interview the following year. He even started, briefly, a new band in 1972 and worked on new recordings in the studio until 1974.
Barrett released two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, in 1970. Like the solo work of Roky Erickson and Skip Spence—two other tragic psychedelic-era geniuses with mental health struggles—Barrett’s later compositions are frustratingly rough-cut gems: quirky, sinister, meandering folk-psych adventures that provide an alternate look into what Pink Floyd might have sounded like if their original intentions of keeping him on as a non-performing songwriter had worked out.
Assisting him during his studio sessions were former bandmates Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour. The band still admired his singular talent, but they found working, and even speaking, with him difficult in the extreme. As Gilmour has described those years in interviews, they carried a considerable amount of guilt over Barrett’s ouster. In addition to the heartbreaking tribute “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” Gilmour has often performed Syd’s solo songs onstage in affecting, often solo acoustic, renditions that became all the more poignant after Barrett’s death in 2006.
In the videos at the top, you can see Gilmour play two songs from Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs—“Terrapin” and “Dark Globe”—and further up, see him play “Dominoes” from Barrett, with Richard Wright on Keyboards. Gilmour has also revisited onstage Pink Floyd’s earliest, Barrett-fronted, days. Just above, we have the rare treat of seeing him play the band’s first single, “Arnold Layne,” with special guest David Bowie on lead vocals. And below, see Gilmour and Wright play a version of the early Floyd classic “Astronomy Domine,” live at Abbey Road studios.
It was, sadly, at Abbey Road where the band last saw Barrett, when he entered the studio in 1975 during the final mixes of Wish You Were Here. Overweight and with shaved head and eyebrows, Barrett was at first unrecognizable. After this last public appearance, he felt the need, as Waters put it, to “withdraw completely” from “modern life.” But the tragic final months with Pink Floyd and few sightings afterward should hardly be the way we remember Syd Barrett. He may have lost the ability to communicate with his former friends and bandmates, but for a time he continued to speak in hauntingly strange, thoroughly original songs. This collection of videos comes to us via JamBase. Related Content: Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant” Comes to Life in a New Retro-Style Animation Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright 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. |
| 4:57p | Download New Storyboarding Software That’s Free & Open Source
Quick tip: The new software package, Storyboarder, makes it "easy to visualize a story as fast you can draw stick figures." You can create a story idea without actually making a full-blown movie and see how it looks. Storyboarder is free. It's open source. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. And you can download it here. As the website Cartoon Brew notes, the stories created in Storyboarder "can be exported to Premiere, Final Cut, Avid, PDF, and animated GIF formats." Or you can "refine the artwork in Photoshop." Get Storyboarder 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: Google Makes Its $149 Photo Editing Software Now Completely Free to Download NASA Puts Its Software Online & Makes It Free to Download Download 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Software, Web Development & Business from O’Reilly Media Download New Storyboarding Software That’s Free & Open Source 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. |
| 7:04p | New Documentary on a Weird & Wonderful Dutch Library Now Free to Stream on Amazon Prime
BoingBoing recently ran a short profile on a new documentary that takes you inside the intriguing Ritman Library. Located in Amsterdam, the library houses 23,000 rare books from hermetic/esoteric/occult traditions--Alchemy, Hermetica, Cabala, Magic, Rosicrucianism, Mystic, Theosophy, Freemasonry, Pansophy and much more. You can watch the trailer for the documentary above. But, even better, you can now stream the complete 90-minute film on Amazon Prime for free. If you have an Amazon Prime account, just click here to start watching. If you don't, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial, watch the doc, and then decide whether to remain a subscriber or not. It's your call. (Note: they also offer a similar arrangement for audiobooks from Audible.) The same deal applies to other films we've featured during the past year. Jim Jarmusch's new documentary Gimme Danger--his "love letter" to punk icons Iggy Pop and The Stooges. And also Long Strange Trip, the new 4-hour documentary on the Grateful Dead. 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: Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Precursor to the Kindle The Art of Making Old-Fashioned, Hand-Printed Books Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books Wearable Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Manuscripts & Turned Them into Clothes Free Online Literature Courses New Documentary on a Weird & Wonderful Dutch Library Now Free to Stream on Amazon Prime 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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