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Monday, December 2nd, 2019
- Just last week we posted a video in which Lynch explains both the Unified Field Theory and Transcendental Meditation. There are at least two major sequences that Twin Perfect suggests reflects the Unified Field.
- Lynch’s obsession with electricity and fire are both essential to the theory.
- The One-Armed Man’s quote “I mean it as it is, as it sounds,” doubles as Lynch’s approach: Twin Perfect does a masterful job showing many, many examples where Lynch is directly explaining his use of metaphor and symbol to us. Sometimes that is straight into the camera.
- We now know why Season Three featured a three minute shot of a man sweeping up peanuts from a bar floor.
- I’ve always felt that The Return was an exploration of the dangers of nostalgia, and this essay confirmed it for me. There was something missing at the center of the Third Season, indeed.
- Twin Perfect reads all quotes from the director in a mock-Lynch voice. For some this will grate; for me it was A BEAUTIFUL THING (wiggly finger gesture).
| Time | Event |
| 2:28a | Masterclass Is Running a “Buy One, Give One Free” Deal on Cyber Monday: It Gives You & Family Member/Friend Access to Their Complete Course Catalog
FYI: Masterclass is running a Buy One, Give One Free special through the end of Cyber Monday Here's the gist: If you buy an All-Access pass to their 70 courses, you will receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge. An All-Access pass costs $180, and lasts one year. For that fee, you--and a family member or friend--can watch courses created by Annie Leibovitz, Neil Gaiman, Malcolm Gladwell, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, David Mamet, Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Helen Mirren, Herbie Hancock, Alice Waters, Billy Collins and so many more. If you're thinking this sounds like a pretty good holiday present, we'd have to agree. The deal is available now. Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation. Masterclass Is Running a “Buy One, Give One Free” Deal on Cyber Monday: It Gives You & Family Member/Friend Access to Their Complete Course Catalog 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.  |
| 10:00a | Twin Peaks Actually Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demystifies It All
I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algorithms can act like a nagging friend, suggesting a video for days until I finally give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tantalizing title: “Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)”. First of all, before, during, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, theories were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Facebook groups. After the mindblowing Episode 8, they went into overdrive, including the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *overlayed* on each other. And I highlighted one in depth journey through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cultural event for this very site. So when I finally clicked on the link I balked immediately: Four and a half hours? Are you kidding me? (You might be saying the very thing to yourself now.) But just like the narrator says, bear with me. Over the week, I watched the entire thing in 30 minute segments, not because it was grueling, but because time is precious and there is a lot to chew over. By the end I was recommending the video to friends only to find some of them were already deep inside Twin Perfect’s analysis. So here we are, with me highly encouraging you to invest the time (providing you have watched all three seasons of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me), but also not wanting to ruin some of Twin Perfect’s theories, which he lays out like a prosecutor, walking us through a general theory of Lynch. However, I will make a few points: Twin Perfect put much more effort into this than most graduate students:
Are there some problems with the theory? Sure. But for every “I don’t know, man,” I said to myself, he immediately followed it up with something spot on. I think he deserves that MFA in Twin Peaks Studies. So brew up some strong coffee and cut yourself a slice of cherry pie, and get stuck in. Related Content: David Bowie’s Mystical Appearances in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Twin Peaks Actually Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demystifies It All 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. |
| 12:00p | You Can Sleep in an Edward Hopper Painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Is This the Next New Museum Trend?
Let's pretend our Fairy Art Mother is granting one wish—to spend the night inside the painting of your choice. What painting will we each choose, and why?
Will you sleep out in the open, undisturbed by lions, a la Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy?
Or experience the voluptuous dreams of Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June?
Paul Gaugin’s portrait of his son, Clovis presents a tantalizing prospect for those of us who haven’t slept like a baby in decades…
The Nightmare by Herny Fuseli should chime with Gothic sensibilities… And it’s a fairly safe bet that some of us will select Edward Hopper's Western Motel, at the top of this post, if only because we heard the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was accepting double occupancy bookings for an extremely faithful facsimile, as part of its Edward Hopper and the American Hotel exhibition. Alas, if unsurprisingly, the Hopper Hotel Experience, with mini golf and a curated tour, sold out quickly, with prices ranging from $150 to $500 for an off-hours stay. Ticket-holding visitors can still peer in at the room any time the exhibit is open to the public, but it’s after hours when the Instagramming kicks into high gear. What guest could resist the temptation to strike a pose amid the vintage luggage and (bluetooth-enabled) wood paneled radio, filling in for the 1957 painting’s lone figure, an iconic Hopper woman in a burgundy dress? The Art Institute of Chicago notes that she is singular among Hopper’s subjects, in that she appears to be gazing directly at the viewer. But as per the Yale University Art Gallery, from which Western Motel is on loan:
Hopefully, those lucky enough to have secured a booking will have perfected the pose in the mirror at home prior to arrival. This “motel” is a bit of a stage set, in that guests must leave the painting to access the public bathroom that constitutes the facilities. (No word on whether the theme extends to a paper “sanitized for your protection” band across the toilet, but there’s no shower and a security officer is stationed outside the room for the duration of each stay.) The popularity of this once-in-a-lifetime exhibit tie-in may spark other museums to follow suit. The Art Institute of Chicago started the trend in 2016 with a painstaking recreation of Vincent Van Gogh’s room at Arles, which it listed on Air BnB for $10/night. Think of all the fun we could have if the bedrooms of art history opened to us...
Dog lovers could get cozy in Andrew Wyeth’s Master Bedroom.
Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) would require something more than double occupancy for proper Instagramming.
Piero della Francesca’s The Dream of Constantine might elicit impressive messages from the sub-conscience...
Tuberculosis nothwithstanding, Aubrey Beardsley’s Self Portrait in Bed is rife with possibilities. Or skip the cultural foreplay and head straight for the NSFW pleasures of The French Bed, a la Rembrandt’s etching. Edward Hopper and the American Hotel will be traveling to the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in June 2020. Related Content: Take a Journey Inside Vincent Van Gogh’s Paintings with a New Digital Exhibition How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, December 9 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates Dennison’s Christmas Book (1921). Follow her @AyunHalliday. You Can Sleep in an Edward Hopper Painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Is This the Next New Museum Trend? 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. |
| 3:00p | Watch a Hand-Drawn Animation of Neil Gaiman’s Poem “The Mushroom Hunters,” Narrated by Amanda Palmer
The arrival of a newborn son has inspired no few poets to compose works preserving the occasion. When Neil Gaiman wrote such a poem, he used its words to pay tribute to not just the creation of new life but to the scientific method as well. "Science, as you know, my little one, is the study / of the nature and behavior of the universe," begins Gaiman's "The Mushroom Hunters." An important thing for a child to know, certainly, but Gaiman doesn't hesitate to get into even more detail: "It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement / and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed." Go slightly over the head of a newborn as all this may, any parent of an older but still young child knows what question naturally comes next: "Why?" As if in anticipation of that inevitable expression of curiosity, Gaiman harks back to "the old times," when "men came already fitted with brains / designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run," and with any luck to come back with a slain antelope for dinner. The women, "who did not need to run down prey / had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them," taking special note of the spots where they could find mushrooms. It was these mushroom hunters who used "the first tool of all," a sling to hold the baby but also to "put the berries and the mushrooms in / the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers. / Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break." But how to know which of the mushrooms — to say nothing of the berries, roots, and leaves — will kill you, which will "show you gods," and which will "feed the hunger in our bellies?" "Observe everything." That's what Gaiman's poem recommends, and what it memorializes these mushroom hunters for having done: observing the conditions under which mushrooms aren't deadly to eat, observing childbirth to "discover how to bring babies safely into the world," observing everything around them in order to create "the tools we make to build our lives / our clothes, our food, our path home..." In Gaiman's poetic view, the observations and formulations made by these early mushroom-hunting women to serve only the imperative of survival lead straight (if over a long distance), to the modern scientific enterprise, with its continued gathering of facts, as well as its constant proposal and revision of laws to describe the patterns in those facts. You can see "The Mushroom Hunters" brought to life in the video above, a hand-drawn animation by Creative Connection scored by the composer Jherek Bischoff (previously heard in the David Bowie tribute Strung Out in Heaven). You can read the poem at Brain Pickings, whose creator Maria Popova hosts "The Universe in Verse," an annual "charitable celebration of science through poetry" where "The Mushroom Hunters" made its debut in 2017. There it was read aloud by the musician Amanda Palmer, Gaiman's wife and the mother of the aforementioned son, and so it is in this more recent animated video. Young Ash will surely grow up faced with few obstacles to the appreciation of science, and even less so to the kind of imagination that science requires. As for all the other children in the world — well, it certainly wouldn't hurt to show them the mushroom hunters at work. This reading will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. via Brain Pickings Related Content: Watch Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer’s Haunting, Animated Take on Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy” Amanda Palmer Animates & Narrates Husband Neil Gaiman’s Unconscious Musings Watch Lovebirds Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman Sing “Makin’ Whoopee!” Live Neil Gaiman’s Dark Christmas Poem Animated 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, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Watch a Hand-Drawn Animation of Neil Gaiman’s Poem “The Mushroom Hunters,” Narrated by Amanda Palmer 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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