10 Essential Tips for Making Great Coffee at Home

in Food & Drink | August 26th, 2013

Perfect-Coffee-Cover

Michael Haft and Har­ri­son Suarez went to col­lege togeth­er, served in the Marines in Afghanistan, then, after return­ing home, stum­bled upon the world of spe­cial­ty cof­fee and began “an obses­sive quest to brew the per­fect cup.” That quest result­ed in the pub­li­ca­tion of an inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal book designed for the iPad. Per­fect Cof­fee at Home ($4.99) uses illus­tra­tions, inter­ac­tive graph­ics, videos and a sound­track to make the tuto­r­i­al “an immer­sive expe­ri­ence.” But you don’t need to foot the bill or have an iPad to improve your cof­fee mak­ing skills.

Over at The Atlantic, Haft and Suarez gave some free advice last week, pub­lish­ing an arti­cle where they, among oth­er things, enu­mer­at­ed 10 essen­tial tips for mak­ing cof­fee. They boiled things down to this:

  1. Buy good cof­fee beans. Prefer­ably whole beans, sus­tain­ably farmed, and roast­ed with­in the past few weeks.
  2. Grind your cof­fee just before brew­ing. They say, “it’s the num­ber one thing you can do to improve your cof­fee at home.”
  3. Store your cof­fee prop­er­ly. Keep the cof­fee in an air­tight con­tain­er, away from sun­light. Try to avoid freez­ing the beans, unless they’re going to linger for more than two weeks.
  4. Use a good amount of cof­fee, and the right pro­por­tion of cof­fee to water. The ide­al is what they call “The Gold­en Ratio,” 17.42 units of water to 1 unit of cof­fee.
  5. Find the right grind size for your cof­fee beans and aim for a uni­form grind.
  6. Con­trol the tem­per­a­ture of your water. Keep it some­where between 195 and 202 degrees. Boil­ing water can sour the cof­fee.
  7. If you get real­ly skilled, you can agi­tate the cof­fee dur­ing the brew­ing to con­trol the taste.
  8. Focus on tech­nique. And once you learn the right tech­nique, make sure you’re pre­cise and con­sis­tent.
  9. Use qual­i­ty tools. Buy the right bean grinder and cof­fee mak­er. Make a good invest­ment in your cof­fee drink­ing future.
  10. When exper­i­ment­ing with the brew­ing process, adjust only one vari­able at a time so you can accu­rate­ly track results.

The Atlantic arti­cle offers more detail than what we’ve high­light­ed above. So we’d encour­age you to give “How to Make Per­fect Cof­fee” a read. You can also find short video primers on the Haft & Suarez YouTube Chan­nel. If you have your own great cof­fee mak­ing tips, def­i­nite­ly share them with us in the com­ments sec­tions below. We want to know!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short, Ani­mat­ed Look at What’s Inside Your Aver­age Cup of Cof­fee

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

The Physics of Cof­fee Rings Final­ly Explained

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

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Fritz Lang’s M (1931)

in Film | August 25th, 2013

When Jean-Luc Godard asked the Aus­tri­an film­mak­er Fritz Lang in 1961 to name his great­est film, the one most like­ly to last, Lang did not hes­i­tate.

“M,” he said.

Made in 1931, near the end of the Weimar Repub­lic, M is Lang’s bril­liant link between silent film and talkies, and between Ger­man Expres­sion­ism and what would even­tu­al­ly be called Film Noir. It tells the sto­ry of a Berlin soci­ety caught up in hys­te­ria over a series of child mur­ders, and of the mas­sive mobi­liza­tion — by police and crim­i­nals alike — to catch the killer.

The Hun­gar­i­an actor Peter Lorre plays Hans Beck­ert, the men­tal­ly dis­turbed mur­der­er. Lorre worked on the film in the day­time while per­form­ing onstage in Bertolt Brecht’s pro­duc­tion of Mann ist Mann in the evenings. His strik­ing per­for­mance in M would cat­a­pult him to inter­na­tion­al star­dom.


The script was writ­ten by Lang and his wife, Thea Von Har­bou. It was inspired by a series of mass mur­ders, cul­mi­nat­ing in a sen­sa­tion­al case of ser­i­al child killings in Düs­sel­dorf. In a 1931 arti­cle, Lang wrote:

The epi­dem­ic series of mass mur­ders of the last decade with their man­i­fold and dark side effects had con­stant­ly absorbed me, as unap­peal­ing as their study may have been. It made me think of demon­strat­ing, with­in the frame­work of a film sto­ry, the typ­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of this immense dan­ger for the dai­ly order and the ways of effec­tive­ly fight­ing them. I found the pro­to­type in the per­son of the Düs­sel­dorf ser­i­al mur­der­er and I also saw how here the side effects exact­ly repeat­ed them­selves, i.e. how they took on a typ­i­cal form. I have dis­tilled all typ­i­cal events from the pletho­ra of mate­ri­als and com­bined them with the help of my wife into a self-con­tained film sto­ry. The film M should be a doc­u­ment and an extract of facts and in that way an authen­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a mass mur­der com­plex.

Although M was not a great box office suc­cess when it was released in Ger­many in 1931, the film grad­u­al­ly grew in stature and is now firm­ly estab­lished as one of the mas­ter­pieces of 20th cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma. The bril­liance of the film’s nar­ra­tive struc­ture, its clas­sic visu­al images (the killer’s shad­ow appear­ing on a poster announc­ing a reward for his cap­ture, a child’s bal­loon caught in a pow­er line, Lor­re’s bulging eyes as he dis­cov­ers a chalk “M” on his shoul­der) and its inven­tive use of sound, for exam­ple in the ser­i­al killer’s omi­nous whistling of Grieg’s Peer Gynt, have made M one of the most stud­ied and imi­tat­ed films ever made.

In 1959 M was re-released in trun­cat­ed form, and for sev­er­al decades after­ward audi­ences were shown a bad­ly altered 89-minute ver­sion. A restora­tion project was mount­ed in the 1990s. The 109-minute ver­sion above, a result of that project, is clos­er to Lang’s orig­i­nal film. It’s now housed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fritz Lang’s “Licen­tious, Pro­fane, Obscure” Noir Film, Scar­let Street (1945)

Free Film Noir Movies

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A Radio Play Based on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Coming Monday. Watch the Trailer.

in Music, Radio | August 24th, 2013

This year, Pink Floy­d’s mas­ter­ful prog rock album The Dark Side of the Moon turns 40. Yes, 40. Explor­ing themes rang­ing from con­flict and greed, to men­tal ill­ness and the pass­ing of time, The Dark Side of the Moon has “every­thing you’d ever want … : Grand, trans­port­ing melodies, synapse-rip­ping synth exper­i­ments and sound col­lages, intri­cate musi­cian­ship, state-of-the-art stu­dio sound and John Lennon-meets-Thom Yorke lyrics like ‘The lunatic is on the grass/Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs/Got to keep the loonies on the path.’ ” Or, so that’s how Rolling Stone mag­a­zine sums up the album that it now ranks 43rd on its list of “The 500 Great­est Albums of All Time.”

Next Mon­day, BBC Radio 2 will hon­or Pink Floy­d’s mag­num opus with a new radio dra­ma from leg­endary play­wright Sir Tom Stop­pard. Appar­ent­ly Stop­pard (who co-wrote the screen­plays for Brazil and Shake­speare in Love) first con­sid­ered writ­ing a play based on the album back in 1973. Now, some 40 years lat­er, he has “trans­formed the Pink Floyd clas­sic into a psy­che­del­ic mash-up of Kant­ian phi­los­o­phy, epic rock and John Prescott sound­bites,” writes The Inde­pen­dent. To get you ready for Dark­side, as the play will be called, Aard­man Ani­ma­tions has cre­at­ed a three-minute trail­er that evokes themes from the album and play. Says the direc­tor Dar­ren Dubic­ki:

I spent time absorb­ing the rich detail from the Pink Floyd album, their art and the dra­ma script. What was fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant to us was that we retained a con­sis­tent visu­al tone that echoed the imagery cre­at­ed over the years for the band. The insane­ly sur­re­al and pow­er­ful art­work cre­at­ed by Storm Thorg­er­son and Hipg­no­sis has always had a strong dis­tor­tion on real­i­ty. Their sense of space and twist­ed con­text make for some uncom­fort­ably beau­ti­ful art. This tone has been con­sis­tent for decades and we want­ed to hon­our this with our con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal, and ana­logue, slant on the style.

You can watch the trail­er above, and find some won­der­ful Pink Floyd mate­r­i­al in the sec­tion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

Watch Pink Floyd Plays Live in the Ruins of Pom­peii (1972)

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Per­forms The Wall at the Berlin Wall (1990)

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Robert Crumb Illustrates Philip K. Dick’s Infamous, Hallucinatory Meeting with God (1974)

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Religion, Sci Fi | August 23rd, 2013

CrumbExperienceofPKD

“I saw God,” Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sher­ri state, “No, you just saw some­thing like God, exact­ly like God.” And hav­ing spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jest­ing Pilate, upon his ask­ing, “What is truth?”

–Philip K. Dick, VALIS

In the months of Feb­ru­ary and March, 1974, Philip K. Dick met God, or some­thing like God, or what he thought was God, at least, in a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry expe­ri­ence he chron­i­cled in sev­er­al obses­sive­ly dense diaries that recent­ly saw pub­li­ca­tion as The Exe­ge­sis of Philip K. Dick, a work of deeply per­son­al theo-philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tion akin to Carl Jung’s The Red Book. What­ev­er it was he encountered—Dick was nev­er too dog­mat­ic about it—he end­ed up refer­ring to it as Zebra, or by the acronym VALIS, Vast Active Liv­ing Intel­li­gence Sys­tem, also the title of a nov­el detail­ing the expe­ri­ences of one very PKD-like char­ac­ter with the improb­a­ble name of “Horselover Fat.”

LSD-trig­gered psy­chot­ic break, gen­uine reli­gious expe­ri­ence, or some­thing else entire­ly, what­ev­er Dick’s encounter meant, he didn’t let the oppor­tu­ni­ty to turn it into art slip by him, and nei­ther did out­sider car­toon­ist and PKD fan Robert Crumb. In issue #17 of the under­ground comix mag­a­zine Weirdo, Crumb nar­rat­ed and illus­trat­ed Dick’s meet­ing with a divine intel­li­gence in the appro­pri­ate­ly titled “The Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence of Philip K. Dick.” It was even­tu­al­ly col­lect­ed in the edi­tion, The Weirdo Years by R. Crumb: 1981-’93. (See the com­ic in motion in the awk­ward, ama­teur video above.) The com­ic quotes direct­ly from Dick’s telling of the event, which began with a wis­dom tooth extrac­tion and was ulti­mate­ly trig­gered by a gold­en Chris­t­ian fish sym­bol worn around the neck of a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal deliv­ery girl. Most PKD fans will be famil­iar with the sto­ry, whether they treat it as gospel or not, but to see it illus­trat­ed with such empa­thet­ic inten­si­ty by Crumb is tru­ly a treat.

If you only know Crumb as the cre­ator of las­civ­i­ous Rube­nesque women and schlub­by, drug­gy horn­dog hip­sters (like Fritz the Cat), you may be sur­prised by these emo­tion­al­ly real­ist illus­tra­tions. If you know Crumb’s more seri­ous work, like his take on the book of Gen­e­sis, you won’t. In either case, fans of Dick, Crumb, or—most likely—both, won’t want to miss this.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 14 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

The Con­fes­sions of Robert Crumb: A Por­trait Script­ed by the Under­ground Comics Leg­end Him­self (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Hand Puppets That Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee Made for His Young Son

in Art, K-12, Theatre | August 23rd, 2013

klee puppet

My kids used to beg their dad to help out with their impromp­tu pup­pet shows. He com­plied by hav­ing our daugh­ter’s favorite baby doll deliv­er an inter­minable cur­tain speech, hec­tor­ing the audi­ence (me) to become sub­scribers and make dona­tions via the small enve­lope they’d find tucked in their pro­grams.

klee puppets 4

Like my hus­band, artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) loomed large in his child’s ear­ly pup­pet work. To mark his son Felix’s ninth birth­day, Klee fash­ioned eight hand pup­pets based on stock char­ac­ters from Kasperl and Gretl — Ger­many’s answer to Punch and Judy. The boy took to them so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly that his dad kept going, cre­at­ing some­thing in the neigh­bor­hood of fifty pup­pets between 1916 and 1925. The cast soon expand­ed to include car­toon­ish polit­i­cal fig­ures, a self-por­trait, and less rec­og­niz­able char­ac­ters with a decid­ed­ly Dada-ist bent. Klee also fixed Felix up with a flea mar­ket frame that served as the prosce­ni­um for the shows he put on in a door­way of the fam­i­ly’s tiny apart­ment.

PaulKleePuppets

When Felix set out into the world at the age of eigh­teen, he packed his favorite child­hood pup­pets, while his dad hung onto the ones born of his years on the fac­ul­ty of the Bauhaus. Felix’s por­tion of the col­lec­tion was almost entire­ly destroyed dur­ing the bomb­ing of Wurzburg in World War II. Dr. Death was the only mem­ber of the orig­i­nal eight to escape unscathed.

klee puppets 3

You can find a gallery of Klee’s pup­pets here, and a book ded­i­cat­ed to Klee’s pup­petry here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, 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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tchaikovsky Pup­pet in Time­lapse Film

Pup­pet Mak­ing with Jim Hen­son: A Price­less Primer from 1969

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

 Ayun Hal­l­i­day is okay with pup­pets as long as she can hold them at arm’s length. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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“Notes from a Dirty Old Man”: Charles Bukowski’s Lost Cartoons from the 60s and 70s

in Art, Poetry | August 23rd, 2013

Buk3

The poet Charles Bukows­ki has appeared often on Open Cul­ture late­ly, and I have no objec­tion. Not only do I savor writ­ing about a lit­er­ary fig­ure thor­ough­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Los Ange­les, where I live, but about one who, even nine­teen years after his death, keeps pro­duc­ing inter­est­ing things. Or at least we keep find­ing them.

A case in point comes from this post by Stephen J. Gertz of Book­tryst about evi­dence redis­cov­ered ear­li­er this year of Bukowski’s efforts as a car­toon­ist: “Nine­teen long-lost orig­i­nal draw­ings by Charles Bukows­ki, Amer­i­ca’s poet lau­re­ate of the depths, sur­faced at the 46th Cal­i­for­nia Inter­na­tion­al Anti­quar­i­an Book Fair Feb­ru­ary 15–17, 2013, offered by ReadInk of Los Ange­les. Six­teen of them appeared as accom­pa­ni­ment to Bukowski’s clas­sic col­umn in the Los Ange­les Free Press (The Freep), ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’. The remain­ing three orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Sun­set Palms Hotel, Issue #4 (1974).”

Buk5

Less comics per se than drawn win­dows into Bukowski’s world­view, these pan­els show, in a shaky yet bold line, the poet­’s views on drink­ing, smok­ing, stay­ing in bed, and con­duct­ing rela­tions with the fair­er sex. “Until its ter­mi­na­tion in 1976,” Gertz con­tin­ues, “Bukowski’s ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’ was prob­a­bly the sin­gle biggest con­tribut­ing fac­tor to both the spread of his lit­er­ary fame and his local noto­ri­ety as a hard-liv­ing, hard-drink­ing L.A. char­ac­ter.” The very idea of Bukows­ki as a reg­u­lar colum­nist may strike some famil­iar with his poet­ry as incon­gru­ous, but you can get an idea of how the gig formed his lit­er­ary per­sona by read­ing the 1969 col­lec­tion Notes of a Dirty Old Man and the 2011 More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncol­lect­ed Columns. Nei­ther, how­ev­er, con­tain Bukowski’s illus­tra­tions, but now you can appre­ci­ate them on the inter­net. They almost make you believe the man could have pub­lished a car­toon or two in the New York­er, but no — wrong coast. (And wrong sen­si­bil­i­ty, cer­tain­ly.)

BukowskiCartoon

via Book Tryst

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Charles Bukows­ki Poems Being Read by Bukows­ki, Tom Waits and Bono

Charles Bukows­ki Sets His Amus­ing Con­di­tions for Giv­ing a Poet­ry Read­ing (1971)

“Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Con­cise Phi­los­o­phy of Art and Life

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The “Most Amazing [Borrowed] College Welcome Speech Ever”

in Uncategorized | August 23rd, 2013

Geor­gia Tech sopho­more and Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing major Nick Sel­by gave a rous­ing wel­come speech at the 2013 Fresh­man Con­vo­ca­tion. It did­n’t take long for the speech to go viral. Or for Gawk­er to real­ize that the speech had been bor­rowed from a 2008 speech giv­en by Andy Stone, once the debate team cham­pi­on at Ari­zona State. (Click here and then skip to the 8:40 mark to see the sim­i­lar part of Stone’s speech.) But here’s per­haps the most straight­for­ward expla­na­tion. It turns out that Sel­by was once coached by Stone, and on his Face­book page, Sel­by writes: “I had an awe­some speech coach in high school by the name of Andy Stone, and was absolute­ly thrilled when he agreed to let me use the end of his award-win­ning speech as the foun­da­tion for my own.”

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Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses

in Literature, Maps | August 22nd, 2013

UllysesMap

Click the image above for a larg­er ver­sion

Just above you’ll find a sketched-out map of the paths Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom took through Dublin on June 16, 1904. If you’ve ever read James Joyce’s Ulysses (find it in our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books), you may well have tried draw­ing one of these your­self, con­nect­ing the loca­tions as each chap­ter finds one of the pro­tag­o­nists some­where else in Ire­land’s cap­i­tal on that “ordi­nary” day. Maybe you want­ed to test the plau­si­bil­i­ty of the com­mon asser­tion that, giv­en accu­ra­cy and detail with which Joyce wrote about the city, one could, in case of the apoc­a­lypse, build the city all over again using the nov­el as a plan. This par­tic­u­lar Ulysses fan map, how­ev­er, comes from the hand of a very spe­cial read­er indeed: Vladimir Nabokov, author of a few much-dis­cussed works of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry lit­er­a­ture him­self, includ­ing Loli­ta, Pale Fire, and Speak, Mem­o­ry.

For those who teach Ulysses, Nabokov has a sug­ges­tion: “Instead of per­pet­u­at­ing the pre­ten­tious non­sense of Home­r­ic, chro­mat­ic, and vis­cer­al chap­ter head­ings, instruc­tors should pre­pare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s inter­twin­ing itin­er­aries clear­ly traced.” A post from Raynor Ganan quotes him as say­ing that, adding, “Would you not have donat­ed a litre of your own spinal flu­id to audit this lec­ture?” Indeed, Nabokov speaks from expe­ri­ence, hav­ing not only pro­duced well-respect­ed lit­er­a­ture but taught it, too. The fruits of his time at the front of the class­room appear in his col­lec­tion Lec­tures on Lit­er­a­ture, though if you want to get as close as pos­si­ble to the expe­ri­ence of sit­ting in on one of Nabokov’s class­es, go back into our archives and watch the WQED drama­ti­za­tion, star­ring Christo­pher Plum­mer, of his talk on Kaf­ka at Cor­nell. It won’t give you any insight into Joyce’s Dublin, grant­ed, but some Yale grad stu­dents’ more recent project to dig­i­tal­ly, inter­ac­tive­ly map Ulysses just might.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, 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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Pod­cast

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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