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Friday, January 7th, 2022
- “‘The Matrix Resurrections’ Is a Crucial Keanu Reeves Movie” by Alex Pappademas
- “The Subversive Playfulness of the ‘The Matrix’” by Brian Phillips
- “Zion Is Inside The Matrix: How Resurrections Honors Warped Fan Theory” by Craig Elvy
- “The Matrix And Gender Identity: The Trans Narrative Behind The Wachowskis’ Sci-Fi Classic” by Sarah El-Mahmoud
- “The Matrix 4’s Video Game Reboot Scene Reveals the Original Films’ True Meaning” by Theo Kogod
- “Why The Matrix Never Stopped Being Relevant” by Emily VanDerWerff
| Time | Event |
| 1:05a | This Is What It Sounds Like When a Harpist Plays “Amazing Grace” and a String Suddenly Breaks
Lisa Warren was peacefully playing “Amazing Grace” on her harp, when suddenly the c string broke and–as she says–“scared the daylights out of me.” Harp playing, it’s not for the faint of heart… Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks! Related Content A Harp Played with a Heavy Distortion Pedal Pink Floyd Songs Played Splendidly on a Harp Guitar: “Comfortably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here” & More Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp Hear the First Song Recorded on the Yazh, a 2,000 Year-Old Indian Instrument This Is What It Sounds Like When a Harpist Plays “Amazing Grace” and a String Suddenly Breaks is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 2:00a | Hear Debussy Play Debussy’s Most Famous Piece, “Clair de lune” (1913)
Claude Debussy died in 1918, at the age of 55: still quite young for a composer, and still quite early in the history of sound recording. This means that, a little over a century later, we have a great many recordings of Debussy’s music, but precious few recordings of Debussy’s music played by the man himself. Once he accompanied opera singer Mary Garden in the performance of three mélodies from Ariettes oubliées, his cycle based on the poetry of Paul Verlaine. Those recordings were made in 1904, and sound it. But in his final years, Debussy also preserved his playing with an outwardly more primitive technology that nevertheless sounds much more pleasing today: the piano roll. Designed to be fed into and automatically reproduced by specially engineered instruments, the piano roll — an early form of the music media we’ve enjoyed over the past few generations — was commercially pioneered by the American company M. Welte & Sons. “It is impossible to attain a greater perfection of reproduction than that of the Welte apparatus,” Debussy once wrote to Edwin Welte, co-inventor of the family company’s Welte-Mignon Reproducing Piano.  The fourteen pieces Debussy recorded for Welte include the Symbolist- and Impressionist-inspired “La soirée dans Grenade,” previously featured here on Open Culture, as well as his most beloved and widely heard work, “Clair de lune.” Immediately recognizable in isolation, the also Verlaine-based “Clair de lune” constitutes one of the four movements of the Suite bergamasque. The entire piece was first published in 1905, but Debussy had actually begun its composition fifteen years before that. The still-frequent use of the third movement in popular culture has, at this point, made it difficult to hear the essential qualities of the piece itself; under such circumstances, who better to bring those qualities out than the composer himself? The video at the top of the post presents a reproduction of “Clair de lune” from the piano roll that Debussy made 109 years ago, the next best thing to having him at the piano. Enthusiasts wonder what Debussy would have written had he lived longer; hearing this, they may also wonder what he would have recorded had he stuck around for the hi-fi age. Related Content: Debussy’s “Clair de lune”: The Classical Music Visualization with 21 Million Views A Dancer Pays a Gravity-Defying Tribute to Claude Debussy Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913 Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff: Three Famous Pieces, 1919-1929 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. Hear Debussy Play Debussy’s Most Famous Piece, “Clair de lune” (1913) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 8:01a | The Matrix Regurgitated — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #113
In light of the release of The Matrix Resurrections, we talk through the franchise as a whole. What made the first one remarkable, and does that a bar that any sequel can reach? We talk through the choices that fed into the new film, why people don’t seem to care about their matrix families, the endless fight scenes, and more. Who will choose the blue pill? This very special holiday episode of Pretty Much Pop reunites the full season one panel: Mark Linsenmayer, Brian Hirt and Erica Spyres, and features the podcasting debut of Mark’s son Abe Linsenmayer. Some articles we considered included: This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network. Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts. The Matrix Regurgitated — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #113 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 9:00a | How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think
Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished, five century-old portrait of a Florentine silk merchant’s wife, Lisa del Giocondo (née Gherardini), is, quite possibly, the most famous painting in the world. And its subject possesses the world’s most captivating smile, inspiring rhapsodies and parodies in seeming equal measure. (Its Italian title, La Gioconda, is a nod to the sitter’s married name, and depending on whom you ask, translates as “joyous,” “light hearted,” or “merry.”) The Louvre, where the painting has resided since 1804 (following stints in Fontainebleau, the Grand Palace of Versailles, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedroom), reserves a special mailbox for paeans from Mona Lisa fans. Ask a random person on the street how this comparatively dinky oil on wood came to be so universally celebrated, and they’ll logically conclude it’s got something to do with that smile. Those with a background in visual art may also cite Renaissance innovations in painting technique — atmospheric perspective and sfumato, both of which Leonardo employed to memorable effect. Those are good guesses, but the real reason for the Mona Lisa’s enduring global renown? The public’s love of a good crime story. As art historian Noah Charney, author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting, recounts in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, La Giocanda owes her blockbuster reputation to a sticky-fingered Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia. In 1911, Peruggia, a painter whose day job involved building crates for works in the Louvre’s collection, hid in a cupboard for hours after closing, then escaped via a back door, the unframed canvas tucked beneath his arm. The police papered the streets of Paris with the Mona Lisa’s likeness on missing flyers, and the press fanned interest in both the crime and the painting. Readers devoured updates that identified poet Guillaume Apollinaire and painter Pablo Picasso as suspects, and steamy theories regarding the nature of the relationship between Leonardo and the lady in the portrait. As art critic Laura Cumming writes in The Guardian, “Millions of people who might not have seen it, might never even have heard of it, soon became experts on Leonardo’s stolen painting.” For two years, its whereabouts remained unknown:
The thief eventually arranged to repatriate the purloined painting to Italy, striking a deal with Florentine art dealer Alfred Geri, who summoned the police as soon as he verified the work’s authenticity. The Mona Lisa was restored to the Louvre, where eager crowds clamored for a look at a newly minted household name they could all recognize by sight, as “newspapers took the story for a victory lap.” Find a quiz and customizable lesson plan on the reasons behind the Mona Lisa’s fame here. Hats off to animator Avi Ofer for his puckish suggestion that Leonardo might have taken some flattering liberties with Lisa del Giocondo‘s appearance. Related Content: When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911) Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online How Leonardo da Vinci Made His Magnificent Drawings Using Only a Metal Stylus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday. How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 12:07p | The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way
I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one. Coffee expert and author of The World Atlas of Coffee James Hoffmann introduces us to the appliance we think we know in the above video. Alfonso Bialetti didn’t originally get into the coffee business. In 1919, the Bialetti company was an aluminum manufacturer, with the Moka Express invented somewhere around 1933 by Luigi de Ponti, who worked for the company. According to Deconstructing Product Design by William Lidwell and Gerry Mancasa, the inspiration came from Bialetti’s wife’s old-fashioned washing machine: “a fire, a bucket, and a lid with a tube coming out of it. The bucket was filled with soapy water, sealed with the lid, and then brought to a boil over the fire, at which point the vaporized soapy water was pushed up through the tube and expelled on to the laundry.” As Hoffmann shows, earlier coffee-makers did use steam and a drip technique, but the Moka Express was the first all-in-one maker that could sit on the stove top and do the work. All the user has to listen for was the tell-tale gurgle when it finishes brewing.
In 1945, Alfonso’s son Renato returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and took over the family business. He was instrumental in focusing on the Moka Express and turning it into an international coffee brand. He hired cartoonist Paul Campani to design l’omino coi baffi, “the mustachioed little man” whose image is on the side of every Moka Express, and during the 1950s was in a series of humorous animated commercials. Bialetti was the pride of Italy, and for Italian immigrants living abroad, it was a treasured object in the kitchen. Such was the identification of Renato Bialetti with the Moka Express that when he died in 2016, his ashes were interred in a giant replica pot. Hoffmann details the fate of the company afterwards, how it has fared against competitors in Italy and outside. Will it still be around in decades? Who knows. But it does make a great cup of coffee.
And he shows the correct way to brew a cup with the Moka Express in this other video. Here’s a few things I was doing wrong: not using hot water in the bottom to start; trying to pack in the ground coffee like I was making an espresso. (Note: a Moka Express coffee is somewhere between an espresso and a pour-over.) Using too fine a grind; and not cooling the bottom as soon as it’s done working its magic. (All these tips I’m going to try tomorrow morning.) Maybe you have been making your Bialetti cup the right way all along. Let me know in the comments. I’ll read them over a freshly brewed cup. Related Content: Life and Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion How to Make the World’s Smallest Cup of Coffee, from Just One Coffee Bean The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here. The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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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