David Bowie and Cher: the combination sounds so incongruous, but then you think about it and realize the two could hardly have more in common. Two singers of the same generation, close indeed in age but both (whether through their sensibilities or through various cosmetic technologies) perpetually youthful; both performers of not exactly rock and not exactly pop, but some oscillating form between that they’ve made wholly their own; both masters of the distinctively flamboyant and theatrical; both given to sometimes radical changes of image throughout the course of their careers; and both immediately identifiable by just one name. The only vast difference comes in their performance schedules: Bowie, despite releasing an acclaimed album The Next Day last year, seems to have quit playing live shows in the mid-2000s, while Cher’s continuing tours grow only more lavish.
Long before this current stage of Bowie and Cher’s lives as musical icons, the two came together on an episode of the latter’s short-lived solo (i.e., without ex-husband Sonny Bono, with whom she’d hosted The Sonny & Cher Show) television variety show, simply titled Cher. On the broadcast of November 23, 1975, Bowie and Cher sang “Young Americans,” at the top, “Can You Hear Me,” just above, and bits of other songs besides.
Watch these clips not just for the performances, and not just for the outfits — costumes, really, especially when you consider Cher’s even then-famous variety of artificial hairstyles — but for the video effects, which by modern standards look like something out of a late-night public-access cable program. An especially trippy set of visuals accompanies Bowie’s solo moment on the episode below, singing about the one quality that perhaps unites he and Cher more than any other: “Fame.” And lots of it.
Since Vivian Kubrick was in grade school, she worked as a collaborator with her famous filmmaker father. She had cameos in a number of his movies including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon. She shot the behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Shining at the age of 24. And she composed the score for Full Metal Jacket under the pseudonym of Abigail Mead. Kubrick seemed to groom his daughter to be his cinematic heir. And then in the late 90s, that all stopped. She cut off all contact with her family.
Kubrick’s family was initially cagey about what happened to her, saying simply that she was living in LA. But then in 2010, Kubrick’s stepdaughter Katharina opened up. “We weren’t lying, we were just being economical with the truth,” she told The Daily Beast. “Because if you say, ‘My sister has become a Scientologist,’ where do you go from that?”
The Church of Scientology’s policy of disconnection is one of its most controversial practices. It’s not clear if Vivian formerly disconnected with her family but she did reportedly attend her father’s funeral in 1999 with a Scientologist minder. When her sister Anya died of cancer in 2009, she did not attend that funeral even though they were, by all accounts, inseparable growing up.
The rift between Kubrick and his daughter became final when he asked her to score Eyes Wide Shut and she refused, as “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy,” recalled Kubrick’s wife and Vivian’s mother. “He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”
Recently on her Twitter feed, Vivian posted a series of photos of herself on the set of her father’s movies. One picture shows an eight-year old Vivian clutching a baby chimp used on 2001. Another shows her hanging out on the milk bar set of A Clockwork Orange. “I helped cut out those Styrofoam letters on the wall,” she writes. Another picture shows Vivian sitting before a 16mm Steenbeck, editing her documentary on The Shining. And, most poignantly, one of her picture’s shows Vivian and Kubrick embracing on a deck chair.
“In Memory of my Dad,” she writes. “Who I loved with all my heart and soul… Dad and Me on the back veranda of Abbots Mead.”
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.
We live in a golden age of television, not just because technology lets us watch shows whenever we like, however we like — thus freeing shows from the tedious need to repeat past events every episode, or worse, to forego the idea of an overarching story entirely — but because technology provides us so many ways to talk about the shows as well. When else, for example, could a critic like Matt Zoller Seitz make the kind of thoughtful video essays he does for so wide an audience? He doesn’t even labor under the obligation to write only about current programs, and you can see the fruits of that freedom in his new video essay above. “A Lie Agreed Upon,” produced for the tenth anniversary of the debut of HBO’s Deadwood, examines the still-resonant neo-Western series created by television auteur David Milch, its genesis, its artistic accomplishments, and what it still has to say about society. “If you’ve read my work,” writes Zoller-Seitz on his blog at RogerEbert.com, “you know I never miss an opportunity to work Deadwood into the conversation, as a legitimate point of comparison with other shows or films or because I just love talking about it.”
Zoller-Seitz channels this critical compulsion into “a stand-alone, nearly half-hour-long piece, co-produced with HitFix, that looks at the show’s style and major themes, as well as its roots in different genres, including the Western and the gangster picture.” On that page, you can even read the essay’s annotated script, which gives you a look at the thought behind this short but rich exegesis on “one of the greatest dramas in American television history,” a show that, though originally conceived for an ancient Roman setting, flawlessly made the transition to a story of “the founding of civilization” in post-Civil War South Dakota. Going from “lewd farce” to “comedy of manners” to “political drama,” Deadwood holds fast to the theme of the basic truths, real or imagined, around which society coheres. After running down the series’ rough-and-tumble cast of characters, most of them addicted to one primitive Old West drug or another — booze, laudanum, hope — Zoller-Seitz paraphrases Milch’s own thoughts on the subject: “A community’s collective agreement on certain principles can be yet another kind of intoxicant — perhaps the most powerful one of all.”
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass often makes its way into the hands of oversized American characters of, shall we say, uncertain repute. We learned, for example, under scandalous circumstances, of Bill Clinton’s admiration for the book, and we’ll never forget the role it played in the rise and fall of similarly alliteratively named, power-mad Walter White.
Another fictional mastermind—Sideshow Bob—quotes gleefully from Leaves of Grass in a recent Simpsons episode. And perhaps the most outré character of them all—the florid speech of the rogue and pimp Al Swearengen in HBO’s Deadwood—derives in part from the “barbaric yawp” Whitman describes as his native tongue in the poem from which the book’s title comes, “Song of Myself.”
One of the many reasons this particular poem from Leaves of Grass captures the imagination of outlaw intellectuals (and narcissists) may be Whitman’s invention of a new American poetic idiom for the eloquent assertion of stridently defiant personal identities. (As Ezra Pound put it, Whitman “broke the new wood.”) The Guardian placed “Song of Myself” at the top of a 10 best American poems list for the “peerless self-performance” of the poem’s hypnotic cadences. Who better to interpret those lines than another self-invented American contrarian, Orson Welles?
During some difficult times in the fifties—in part due to Welles’ IRS trouble—the great actor/director/multi-media impresario found work on radio plays in England, including The Lives of Harry Lime (based on his character in The Third Man) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (as Moriarty). In 1953, the BBC contracted with Welles to record an hour of readings from “Song of Myself.” BBC 3 broadcast the session, and it later saw release as an LP, now sadly out of print. Fortunately, however, much of this recording has been digitally preserved. At the top, hear Welles read section VI of the poem, and directly above, hear him read the heretical section XLVIII. The Mickle Street Review, an online journal of Whitman studies, hosts a small part of Side 1 and, it appears, all of Side 2 of the record, below. The text of the poem was too long for a full treatment, and Welles, it seems, abridged and adapted some of the work himself. His reading was apparently very well received by the UK press.
Side 1:
Side 2:
While the BBC commissioned the recordings—and Welles no doubt needed the money—he already had an affinity for Whitman. In the same year he completely re-invented American film with Citizen Kane, he also began broadcasting the Orson Welles Show on CBS Radio, on which he and his guests gave dramatic readings from drama, poetry, and fiction. Welles produced 19 episodes, though only 8 have survived. One of the lost episodes, from December 1, 1941, featured Welles reading from Leaves of Grass. As further evidence, we have this photograph of Welles reading Gay Wilson Allen’s The Solitary Singer, a critical biography of the poet.
What draws Welles, and restless personalities like him, to Whitman, and especially to Leaves of Grass? One answer lies in Whitman’s own life. Early on, PBS’s American Experience tells us, Whitman staked out “radical positions… putting him in near constant opposition to society’s prevailing sentiments.” He never moderated his views or his voice, though faced with charges of blasphemy, obscenity, bad writing, and various other public vices at the time. Whitman’s steadfast commitment to his political and artistic vision brought him worldwide acclaim, as well as censure, in his lifetime. A particularly scathing 1882 Atlantic review of the second printing of Leaves of Grass catalogues Whitman’s literary abuses and concludes that “the book cannot attain to any very wide influence.” Despite this terribly wrongheaded prediction, the reviewer at least recognizes Whitman’s “generous aspiration,” a quality held in common by all of Whitman’s admirers, be they heroes, villains, or just average people responding to the poet’s raw self-assertion and capacious, grandiose, and particularly American, form of longing.
In high school, my physics teacher taught the class by having us listen to his long, monotonous lectures. After I realized that I couldn’t digest his verbal lessons, I stopped listening. Instead, I picked up a textbook and never looked back. I can only imagine how much better off I would have been had I taken a physics class like Brian Greene’s special relativity course on World Science U.
We featured Greene’s work two years ago, when the Columbia University physicist and mathematician launched his impressive PBS series, The Fabric of The Cosmos. Now, Greene and other scientists have created a new education platform called World Science U, and it promises to offer rich, rigorous and engaging courses in the sciences — for free. As Greene explains above, the free courses offered by World Science U take abstract concepts and represent them graphically, using a slew of interactive activities and real-world scenarios. Students receive immediate performance feedback on the problem sets they complete, and have access to a large number of video lectures. Theory is illustrated by way of intuitive animations, and exercises are paired with video solutions that take students through the ideal way to derive the answer.
Although later classes will tackle general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other subjects, World Science U has only two full courses available at present. The first is Greene’s brief conceptual class on special relativity that lasts 2–3 weeks, called Space, Time, and Einstein. There’s also a more advanced, university level course on the same topic called Special Relativity, which lasts about 10 weeks. Interested? We’ll let Greene himself tell you a little more about them in the video below.
Every revolutionary age produces its own kind of nostalgia. Faced with the enormous social and economic upheavals at the nineteenth century’s end, learned Victorians like Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church models and played the bishops of Western culture, with a monkish devotion to preserving and transmitting old texts and traditions and turning back to simpler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape. Compiled by Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the compendium of literature, philosophy, and the sciences, writes Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine, served as a “monument from a more humane and confident time” (or so its upper classes believed), and a “time capsule…. In 50 volumes.”
What does the massive collection preserve? For one thing, writes Kirsch, it’s “a record of what President Eliot’s America, and his Harvard, thought best in their own heritage.” Eliot’s intentions for his work differed somewhat from those of his English peers. Rather than simply curating for posterity “the best that has been thought and said” (in the words of Matthew Arnold), Eliot meant his anthology as a “portable university”—a pragmatic set of tools, to be sure, and also, of course, a product. He suggested that the full set of texts might be divided into a set of six courses on such conservative themes as “The History of Civilization” and “Religion and Philosophy,” and yet, writes Kirsch, “in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is ‘Progress.’” “Eliot’s [1910] introduction expresses complete faith in the ‘intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization.’”
In its expert synergy of moral uplift and marketing, The Harvard Classics (find links to download them as free ebooks below) belong as much to Mark Twain’s bourgeois gilded age as to the pseudo-aristocratic age of Victoria—two sides of the same ocean, one might say.
The idea for the collection didn’t initially come from Eliot, but from two editors at the publisher P.F. Collier, who intended “a commercial enterprise from the beginning” after reading a speech Eliot gave to a group of workers in which he “declared that a five-foot shelf of books could provide”
a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.
Collier asked Eliot to “pick the titles” and they would publish them as a series. The books appealed to the upwardly mobile and those hungry for knowledge and an education denied them, but the cost would still have been prohibitive to many. Over a hundred years, and several cultural-evolutionary steps later, and anyone with an internet connection can read all of the 51-volume set online. In a previous post, we summarized the number of ways to get your hands on Charles W. Eliot’s anthology:
You can still buy an old set off of eBay for $399 [now $299.99]. But, just as easily, you can head to the Internet Archiveand Project Gutenberg, which have centralized links to every text included in The Harvard Classics (Wealth of Nations, Origin of Species, Plutarch’s Lives, the list goes on below). Please note that the previous two links won’t give you access to the actual annotated Harvard Classics texts edited by Eliot himself. But if you want just that, you can always click here and get digital scans of the true Harvard Classics.
In addition to these options, Bartleby has digital texts of the entire collection of what they call “the most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time.” But wait, there’s more! Much more, in fact, since Eliot and his assistant William A. Neilson compiled an additional twenty volumes called the “Shelf of Fiction.” Read those twenty volumes—at fifteen minutes a day—starting with Henry Fielding and ending with Norwegian novelist Alexander Kielland at Bartleby.
What may strike modern readers of Eliot’s collection are precisely the “blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress” that it represents. For example, those three harbingers of doom for Victorian certitude—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—are nowhere to be seen. Omissions like this are quite telling, but, as Kirsch writes, we might not look at Eliot’s achievement as a relic of a naively optimistic age, but rather as “an inspiring testimony to his faith in the possibility of democratic education without the loss of high standards.” This was, and still remains, a noble ideal, if one that—like the utopian dreams of the Victorians—can sometimes seem frustratingly unattainable (or culturally imperialist). But the widespread availability of free online humanities certainly brings us closer than Eliot’s time could ever come.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided a scientific answer to a philosophical question: must design imply a designer? To the dismay and disbelief of many of Darwin’s contemporaries, and a great many still, his theory can answer the question in the negative. But there are many more questions yet to ask about seemingly designed systems, such as those posed by Alan Turing and John Searle: might such organized systems, natural and manmade, themselves be intelligent? The history of these inquiries among philosophers, scientists, and writers is the subject of Prof. James Paradis’ MIT course, “Darwin and Design.” The class explores such a diverse range of texts as Aristotle’s Physics, the Bible, Adam’s Smith’s Wealth of Nations, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and of course, Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Alongside the scientific conclusions so-called “Darwinism” draws are the implications for human self-understanding. Given the thousands of years in which humanity placed itself at the center of the universe, and the few hundred in which it at least held fast to concepts of its special creation, what, asks Prof. Paradis, does Darwinism mean “for ideas of nature and of mankind’s place therein?” The class explores this question through “manifestations of such undesigned worlds in literary texts” both classical and contemporary. See the full course description below:
Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.
Prof. Paradis taught the class in the Fall of 2010, but thanks to MIT’s Open Courseware, all of the lectures (above), assignments, and course materials are freely available, though you’ll have to purchase most of the texts (you can find some in our list of 500 free ebooks). You can’t register or receive credit for the course—so you can skip writing the papers and meeting deadlines of around 100 pages of reading per week—but if you work through some or all of the lectures and assigned readings, Prof. Paradis promises an enlightening “historical foundation for understanding a rich literary tradition, as well as many assumptions held by people in many contemporary cultures.” Given that this is an MIT course, Prof. Paradis assumes some familiarity on the part of his students with the basic Darwinian concepts and controversies. For a broad overview of Darwin’s importance to a wide variety of fields, take a look at Stanford’s online lecture series “Darwin’s Legacy.”
“Darwin and Design” is but one of over 800 free online courses we’ve compiled, including many on evolution, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science.
Since 1994’s Clerks turned him from a proud New Jersey slacker into a leading light of the 1990s’ American independent film boom, cinephiles have energetically debated Kevin Smith’s abilities as a filmmaker. Even Smith admits that he considers himself more a writer who happens to direct than a director per se, and his fans and detractors alike seem to consider his scripts more a vehicle for his entertaining way with speech — with jokes, with cultural references, with elaborate foulmouthedness — than anything else. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that so much of his 21st-century output consists of podcasts, nor that, when you go all the way back in his filmmaking career, even before Clerks, you find a short but talkative, jocular, by turns placid and vitriolic, only seemingly improvisational piece like Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary, his first and only student film, made while enrolled for just four months at the technically oriented Vancouver Film School.
Having come up with the idea for a documentary on a local transsexual named Emelda Mae, Smith and classmate Scott Mosier, who would go on to become Smith’s longtime producing partner, found themselves unprepared to follow through on the project as they’d (vaguely) envisioned it. To make matters worse, Mae herself then skipped town, leaving behind not a hint as to her whereabouts. But amid this film-school crisis, Smith’s true filmmaking talent flowered: instead of a “serious” profile of his absent subject, he made a satirical examination of how that idea ran so quickly and unsalvageably aground, consisting not just of his and Mosier’s parodically confident reflections on the nature of the “failure,” but also their irate instructors’ and collaborators’ earnestly detailed accounts of how they couldn’t get their act together. But just two years later, Clerks would slouch its way to game-changing prominence in American cinema. Whatever you think of everything Smith and Mosier have put out since, you have to admit that this lazy-student gambit worked out pretty well for them.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
