Today, those who get “turned on” to Aldous Huxley (as they might have said back in the 1960s) get it through his books: the dystopian novel Brave New World, usually, or perhaps the mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception. But during Huxley’s lifetime, especially in its final years from the late 1950s to the early 60s, he made no small number of adherents through lecturing. Having transplanted himself from his native England to California in 1937, he eventually achieved great regard among the region’s self-styled intellectuals and spiritual seekers, giving talks at such mystically high-in-the-zeitgeist places as Hollywood and Santa Barbara’s Vedanta temples and even Big Sur’s famous Esalen Institute. But the prolific speech-giver also went farther afield, to far squarer venues such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, in 1962, he recorded the album Visionary Experience: A Series Of Talks On The Human Situation, which you can hear on Ubuweb, or right below.
At that point, Huxley had already gained worldwide fame for his views on better living, which was sometimes achieved, he believed, through psychedelic drugs. This might have already sounded like old hat in, say, the San Francisco of the late 1960s, let alone the 70s and onward, but in these recordings Huxley says his piece in — I still can’t quite believe it — the MIT of the early 1960s. But Huxley, diagnosed a couple years before with the cancer that would claim his life the next, had nothing to lose by spreading the word of his substance-induced discoveries. These would, as you may remember, even facilitate the death itself, Huxley’s final visionary experience. To learn even more about all those that preceded it, see his collection Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931–1963), that’s available on the Internet Archive. While we here at Open Culture don’t endorse drug use, we do endorse the words of Huxley as a substitute, and perhaps an even more vivid one.
Singing a piece of music for the first time while reading the notes from a sheet is hard, and requires complete control of one’s vocals. Today, the most popular ways of teaching this skill to musicians are based on the solfège method, where notes on a scale are matched to particular syllables: your standard do, re, mi, fa, so la, si. Students practice singing different combinations of these syllables, using varying rhythms and intervals, and eventually cement their knowledge of that particular scale. The method is, surprisingly, almost a millenium old, with the first European use of this mnemonic technique dating back to the middle ages.
In the 11th century, a monk known as Guido of Arezzo, began to use the “Guidonian hand” as way to teach medieval music singers his hexachord, or six-note scales. Arezzo, who had also devised the modern musical notation system, had noticed that singers struggled to remember the various Gregorian chants that the monastic orders performed in the monasteries.
To help their memorization, Guido decided to take the first syllable in each line of the well known hymn Ut Queant Laxis, and created a hexachord, or six note scale, that singers familiar with the hymn already knew: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. The hand, shown above, was a map of the musical notes in this hexachord system, with each note associated with a particular joint. In all, the Guidonian hand ranges almost three octaves. Although it had fallen out of use for the past few centuries, the Guidonian hand seems to be making a comeback. Here’s a video of the method in action, forwarded our way by Anton Hecht, an Open Culture reader:
I love the concept, but can’t help feel that using the Guidonian hand during a performance makes you look a little like a first grader struggling with basic arithmetic.
For more information on the Guidonian hand, check out this writeup of a 2011 Stanford symposium, and watch another demonstration video, here.
In one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” King’s discussion of opening lines is compelling because of his dual focus as an avid reader and a prodigious writer of fiction—he doesn’t lose sight of either perspective:
We’ve talked so much about the reader, but you can’t forget that the opening line is important to the writer, too. To the person who’s actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both.
This is excellent advice. As you orient your reader, so you orient yourself, pointing your work in the direction it needs to go. Now King admits that he doesn’t think much about the opening line as he writes, in a first draft, at least. That perfectly crafted and inviting opening sentence is something that emerges in revision, which can be where the bulk of a writer’s work happens.
Revision in the second draft, “one of them, anyway,” may “necessitate some big changes” says King in his 2000 memoir slash writing guide On Writing. And yet, it is an essential process, and one that “hardly ever fails.” Below, we bring you King’s top twenty rules from On Writing. About half of these relate directly to revision. The other half cover the intangibles—attitude, discipline, work habits. A number of these suggestions reliably pop up in every writer’s guide. But quite a few of them were born of Stephen King’s many decades of trial and error and—writes the Barnes & Noble book blog—“over 350 million copies” sold, “like them or loathe them.”
1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”
3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”
4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”
5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”
6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”
7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”
8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”
10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”
11. There are two secrets to success. “I stayed physical healthy, and I stayed married.”
12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”
13. Eliminate distraction. “There’s should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”
14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”
15. Dig. “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”
16. Take a break. “You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”
17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”
18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.”
19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”
They say Seinfeld was about nothing. But the clip above puts that sense of nothingness into perspective. Running six plus minutes, the montage assembled by LJ Frezza presents “A supercut of empty shots. A New York without people.” Essentially moments of pure nothingness. When you’re done, you can graduate to some more existentialist ideas — some fun, some substantive — in our archive.
On January 13, 1931, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held a ball at the Hotel Astor in New York City. According to an advertisement for the event, anyone who paid $15 per ticket (big money during the Depression) could see a “hilarious modern art exhibition” and things “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic.” Attendees also got to witness more than 20 famous architects dressed as buildings they had designed, some of them now fixtures of the New York City skyline.
A 2006 article in The New York Times notes that the event, now considered “one of the most spectacular parties of the last century,” was covered by WABC radio. A few photographs remain (like the one above — click it to enlarge). As does a tantalizing short bit of video.
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Born in Philadelphia, Brenner started out a documentary filmmaker, but eventually launched a career as a comedian. His big break came on January 8, 1971 when Johnny Carson let him do nine minutes of standup on The Tonight Show. Carson apparently liked Brenner’s observational comedy routine. In years to come, Brenner made a record-setting 157 appearances on Johnny’s show, sometimes as a comedy act, sometimes as a substitute host. Above you can watch the very first of those funny appearances.
After the infant Herzog survived a bombing that covered him in rubble, his mother, understandably fearing for her children’s safety, fled to the mountains. The remoteness of his upbringing sheltered him in some ways (“I did not even know that cinema existed until I was 11”) and not, in others. (“At age four, I was in possession of a functioning submachine gun and my brother had a hand grenade.”)
When he says that hunger was a prevailing theme, I dare you to disagree.
Dire predictions, and yet he fills me with cheer every time he opens his mouth. I swear it’s not just that marvelous, much imitated voice. It’s also a comfort to know we’ve got a prolific artist remaining at his outpost from a sense of duty, gloomy yet stout as a child in his belief that an ecstasy of truth lies within human grasp.
In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) unveiled a sprawling, exhaustive exhibit on Stanley Kubrick. And it had just about everything you might want on the great director. Early photographs he took for Look magazine in the 1940s? Check. The blood soaked dresses of those creepy twins from The Shining? You got it! Sketches, notes and documents about Napoleon, the greatest movie he never made? They had a whole room for that. For those cinephiles who worship at Kubrick’s altar, LACMA’s exhibit was akin to a visit to the Vatican. There were more holy relics there than you could shake a monolith at—oh, and they had one of those there too.
The exhibit wrapped up in June 2013. If you missed it and you are jonesing for more Kubrick memorabilia, take heart — LACMA designed an app in conjunction with the exhibit for the iPhone, iPad and Android and you can download it right now. For free. The app is about as sprawling as the exhibit (and it will take a bit of time to download) but it features hand drawn notes from Kubrick, behind-the-scenes pictures from all of his movies, and interviews with the director, plus ones with the likes of Elvis Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and Douglas Trumbull.
The only thing that the app and the exhibit didn’t cover is the ever-growing number of insane conspiracy theories surrounding his work. Want something about how The Shining is really about a faked moon landing or how Eyes Wide Shut is really about the Illuminati? Look somewhere else.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
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In 2012, the 
