Tonight, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot to death Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri this past summer. Following the controversial decision, St. Louis Public Radio started to upload key documents from the grand jury proceedings to its website. The documents include grand jury testimony, forensic evidence, medical reports, and law enforcement interviews. View it all here and be sure to check back for updates.
Read Online Key Documents from the Ferguson Grand Jury: Witness Testimony, Forensic Evidence & More
The Crazy, Iconic Life of Nico; Andy Warhol Muse, Velvet Underground Vocalist, Enigma in Amber
There’s no denying that train wrecks make great documentary subjects.
Not that Abraham Lincoln doesn’t, but watching someone come unglued is a whole ‘nother sort of compelling. Upsetting, even.
Docs in this genre usually require the subject to have left the building in order to reach a satisfying conclusion. The final word belongs to an assortment of friends, colleagues, admirers, enemies…some of whom may be harboring ulterior motives.
Surely German chanteuse Nico’s appearance factored into Andy Warhol’s decision to elevate her to Factory superstar status. (See his video of her immediately above.) She was a model after all, arresting enough to have appeared as herself in La Dolce Vita. She romanced rock gods, film directors, and movie stars, many of whom have their say in Susanne Ofteringer’s documentary Nico-Icon, viewable in its entirety up top.
It’s a fascinating, cautionary portrait, but as the backseat psychoanalysis mounted, I found myself wanting to hear from the subject more. With apologies to Neil Diamond fans, we decided it was only fitting to show you Nico having her own say.
Maybe she was a nightmare. Former keyboardist, James Young, wrote a book about his time on tour with her. He’s in the documentary, of course. Aspiring icons, you’ve been forewarned:
When I worked with her her looks were gone and she wasn’t this Chelsea Girl creature, this peroxide blonde Marlene Dietrich moon goddess vamp. She was a middle aged junkie.
Nice. You reckon he might have gone easier on her, had she been one of John Waters’ superstars, the late Edith Massey or the still-thriving Mink Stole?
Forget sticks and stones. It takes a lot more heroin and hard living to kill the looks of anyone with her bone structure.
Did Nico really have such little use for anyone’s approval but her own? The art she made after her iconic work with the Velvet Underground convinces me that her embrace of ugly–what Chelsea Girls director referred to as her “stupid German perversity”–was sincere.
She’s still an enigma trapped in amber. She’ll be your mirror.
Find 200 free documentaries in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Related Content:
Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Salvador Dalí
Nico Sings “Chelsea Girls” in the Famous Chelsea Hotel
Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico Reunite, Play Acoustic Velvet Underground Songs on French TV, 1972
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Literary Remains of Gabriel García Márquez Will Rest in Texas
Gabriel García Márquez’s notes for The General in His Labyrinth (1989) via The Ransom Center & The New York Times
Quick note: The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library at UT-Austin, announced this morning that it has acquired the archive of Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning, Colombian novelist who passed away earlier this year. His literary remains include “original manuscript materials for 10 books …; more than 2,000 pieces of correspondence, including letters from Carlos Fuentes and Graham Greene; drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech; more than 40 photograph albums documenting all aspects of his life over nearly nine decades; the Smith Corona typewriters and computers on which he wrote some of the 20th century’s most beloved works; and scrapbooks meticulously documenting his career via news clippings from Latin America and around the world.”
All of this material, The Harry Ransom Center goes on to say, will conveniently site alongside archives of others authors who inspired García Márquez — most notably, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner and James Joyce.
The New York Times has a small gallery of images showcasing photos in the newly acquired collection. Take a quick spin through it here.
Related Content:
Read 10 Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Interviews)
Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)
Carlos Fuentes: “You Have to See the Face of Death in Order to Start Writing Seriously”
Shelf Life: American Museum of Natural History Creates New Video Series on Its 33 Million Artifacts
I once spent a summer as a security guard at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. A wonderful place to visit, but my workday experience proved dreadfully dull. By far the highlight was being pulled off whatever exhibit I happened to be guarding to assist in collections, a cavernous backstage area where untold treasures were shelved without ceremony. The head conservator confided that many of these items would never be singled out for display. The thrift store egalitarianism that reigned here was far more appealing than the eye-catching, educational signage in the public area. From the oblivion of deep storage springs the potential for discovery.
How gratifying to learn that the 200 plus scientists employed by the American Museum of Natural History feel the same. As palentologist Mike Novacek, puts it in Shelf Life, the museum’s just launched monthly video series:
You can make new discoveries in Collections just like you can out in the field. You can walk around the corner and see something that no one’s quite observed that way before, describe a new species or a new feature that’s important to science.
The institution can choose from among more than 33,430,000 goodies, from ancient objects they’ve been carefully tending for more than two centuries to the samples of frozen tissue and DNA comprising the barely 13-year-old Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection for Molecular and Microbial Research.
Gems and meteorites!
Arrowheads and gourds!
Vertebrates and invertebrates!
There’s truly something here for…
Wasp enthusiasts (you know who you are) can thrill to the seven and a half million specimens in sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s Cynipidae collection. (They’re ready for their close up, Mr. DeMille. Famous as they are, the first episode passed them over in favor of a more photogenic mock bee from the genus Criorhina.)
Future episodes will call upon in-house ichthyologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, astrophysicists, and herpetologists to discuss such topics as specimen preparation, taxonomy, and curation. Stay abreast (and — bonus!- celebrate Nero’s birthday with turtles) by subscribing to the museum’s youtube channel.
Related Content:
A Panoramic Virtual Tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Download the Universe: A Discerning Curator for Science eBooks
How to Make a Mummy — Demonstrated by The Getty Museum
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She goes into more detail about her short-lived stint as a museum security guard in her third book, Job Hopper. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968)
Image via Wikimedia Commons
We enjoy the work of Charles Bukowski here at Open Culture, but recently we’ve weighted our attention toward his late work. And I mean his very late work, like the last poem he ever faxed. So today we turn to the very back of Bukowski’s back pages, for 130 minutes of the cantankerous yet oddly hope-filled poet and novelist’s first-ever recorded readings, all available at Ubuweb. They come, as the site says, “culled from tapes made by Bukowski at his Los Angeles home in 1968 for biographer and rock critic Barry Miles, long before the author had begun regular public readings.” Few would expect the behavior of a shrinking violet from the likes of Bukowski, but this occasion found him “so shy he insisted that he record alone. He reads both poetry and prose, gets thoroughly drunk during the recording, and bitches about his life, his landlord, and his neighbors.”
This material all comes the album At Terror Street and Agony Way, commercially issued in 2000 but now out of print. Now that it has made its way to the internet, you can enjoy such vintage, lean Bukowski cuts as “The State of World Affairs” (“The Hollywood hills stand there, stand there, full of drunks and insane people and much kissing and automobiles”), “I Cannot Stand Tears” (“There were several hundred fools around the goose who broke his leg, trying to decide what to do, when the guard walked up and pulled out his cannon”), and “I Wanted to Overthrow the Government” (“The weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as their ideas, and that ideas were governments turned into men; and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini and it ended in the bedroom”).
You can hear the whole thing, in all its spirited (in both senses of the word) glory on Ubuweb’s Bukowski page, which also offers such choice recordings as 1969’s 70 Minutes in Hell, 1973’s Poems and Insults, and 1980’s Hostage.
Find more of Bukowskis’s 1968 recordings at Ubuweb.
Related Content:
Listen to Charles Bukowski Poems Being Read by Bukowski Himself & the Great Tom Waits
So You Want to Be a Writer?: Charles Bukowski Explains the Dos & Don’ts
The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukowski
1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for FreeColin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A Cabinet of Curiosities: Discover The Public Domain Review’s New Book of Essays
Many of the regulars to the glorious pages of Open Culture might be familiar with The Public Domain Review project, having been featured on OC a fair few times. From sixteenth-century woodcuts on how to swim to hand-colored photographs of nineteenth-century Japan, you will have seen links to all sorts of historical oddities and delights that we’ve gathered from various archives and highlighted on The Public Domain Review. In addition to these shorter collection posts, since we started in 2011, we’ve also published a steady stream of long-form essays on similar wonders from the historical record. It is with great pleasure this week to announce that The Public Domain Review has compiled a selection of these essays into a brand-new beautiful book!
Spread across six themed chapters – Animals, Bodies, Words, Worlds, Encounters and Networks – the collection includes a total of thirty-four essays from a stellar line up of contributors, including Jack Zipes, Frank Delaney, Colin Dickey, George Prochnik, Noga Arikha, and Julian Barnes.
There’s a whole host of weird and wonderful topics explored: from the case of Mary Toft, the woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits, to William Warren’s search for the coordinates of Eden; from Thomas Browne’s odd litany of imagined artefacts, to the phrasebooks of the invented language Volapük; from the strange literary fruits of the “it-narrative” fad, to epic verse in praise of a cat named Jeoffry; from a history of the painted smile, to the bizarre world of medieval animals trials.
The collection is not all obscurities and unknown tales. We have some big hitters in there too. Great essays on figures you will no doubt have heard of — the Brothers Grimm, Proust , Flaubert, Joyce — but all approached from new angles and illuminated by unfamiliar lights.
With 146 illustrations, more than half of which have been newly sourced especially for the book, this is very far from simply the website in print form. It is a beautiful object in and of itself, lovingly designed by writer and designer Nicholas Jeeves.
Anyhow, I hope I’ve enticed you all sufficiently to check out the page on the site for more details, and perhaps even to place an order or two! If you would like to grab yourself a copy then do make sure to put your order in before midnight on November 26th as up until then we’ll be offering the book for a special discounted rate and also ensuring delivery by Christmas.
Adam Green is the co-founder and editor of The Public Domain Review.
French Couple Sings an Achingly Charming Version of VU’s “Femme Fatale”
Day in, day out, we rummage around the internet, looking for new material to bring your way. I start searching, and I never quite know where the search will take me. Some paths lead to dead ends, others to interesting side streets. Speaking of interesting side streets.… Yesterday a trip through some old Velvet Underground material (more on that tomorrow) led me to this small, unexpected delight. Above, we have Mathieu and Pauline, two young French musicians, singing an achingly charming version of VU’s “Femme Fatale”. There’s so much beauty and youth in it, it kinda hurts. Below, see them sing a cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Elisa.”
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.
Related Content:
Andy Warhol Shoots the Only Color Film of The Velvet Underground Playing Live in Concert (1967)
The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”
If you’ve taken a good art history course on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, you’ve inevitably encountered Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece “Starry Night,” which now hangs in the MoMA in New York City. The painting, the museum writes on its web site, “is a symbolic landscape full of movement, energy, and light. The quietness of the village contrasts with the swirling energy of the sky.… Van Gogh’s impasto technique, or thickly applied colors, creates a rhythmic effect—the picture seems to constantly move in its frame.” Artistically, van Gogh managed to capture movement in a way that no artist had ever quite done it before. Scientifically, it turns out, he was on to something too. Just watch the new TED-ED lesson above, The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Created by math artist/teacher Natalya St. Clair and animator Avi Ofer, the video explores how “Van Gogh captured [the] deep mystery of movement, fluid and light in his work,” and particularly managed to depict the elusive phenomenon known as turbulence. In Starry Night, the video observes, van Gogh depicted turbulence with a degree of sophistication and accuracy that rivals the way physicists and mathematicians have best explained turbulence in their own scientific papers. And, it all happened, perhaps by coincidence (?), during the turbulent last years of van Gogh’s life.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.
Support Us
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!
Receive our Daily Email
About Us
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.
Advertise With Us
