Give “The London Evolution Animation” seven minutes, and it will show you the historical development of London over the course of 2,000 years. The animation moves from the Roman port city of Londinium (circa 50 AD) through the Anglo-Saxon, Tudor, Stuart, Early Georgian, Late Georgian, Early Victorian and Late Victorian periods. It then brings you through the Early 20th Century and into Postwar London. Developed by The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the animation was made with historical data about London’s road networks and buildings. The video recently appeared at the “Almost Lost” Exhibition in London, an exhibition that contemplated how digital maps can help us rethink the past, present and future of great cities.
If you find it difficult to read the text in the animation, you can view the video in a larger format here.
And in case you’re wondering, the enlarging yellow dots show “the position and number of statutorily protected buildings and structures built during each period.” More information on the animation can be found here.
If you’re looking for a free read today, let us turn your attention to our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. Arendt, Asimov, Austen, Balzac, Baudelaire, Bradbury, Bukowski, Calvino, Chekhov, Clarke (as in Arthur C.), Dante, Dick (as in Philip K.), Dickens, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Freud, Gaiman, Ginsberg, Gogol, Hemingway, Huxley, Joyce, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Lovecraft, Melville, Nabokov, Nietzsche, Oates (as in Joyce Carol), Orwell, Plath, Poe, Pound, Proust, Russell (as in Bertrand), Sartre, Shakespeare, Stein, Tolstoy, Twain, DFW, Wells (as in H.G.), Whitman, Zola — they’re all on the list.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching this instructional video (not made by us) beforehand to take full advantage of the collection. And, if downloading files seems like a burden, fear not. We often give you the ability to simply read texts online.
On April 26, 1986, the number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up in what is now Ukraine. The site spewed a cloud of radioactive material that spread over much of Europe. The area immediately around Chernobyl received more than 400 times the radiation as Hiroshima and won’t be safely inhabitable for about 20,000 years. The government set up a 1,000 square mile exclusion zone around the site. While short visits to the zone are possible without too much danger, living there is not advisable. Cancer is a real problem for the couple hundred elderly stalwarts who still make the zone their home.
Within the zone, nature has taken its own course, dismantling the Soviet-era brutalist tenements of the surrounding abandoned cities and turning it into what at first blush looks more and more like a prelapsarian Eden. The truth proves to be more complicated.
Dr. Timothy Mousseau, a biologist from the University of South Carolina, has been examining the wildlife around Chernobyl for fifteen years. He’s discovered that the radiation that has been bathing the area for almost 30 years is changing nature. As you can see in the New York Times Op-Doc video above, birds are developing tumors, bugs have abnormal spots and spider webs seem much more freeform than usual. Get more on the story over at the Times.
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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.
Here at Open Culture, we don’t just feature education in your recommended daily servings of culturally wide-ranging video, audio, text, and image — we also feature it in a form that goes deep: whole courses you can download to your computer or mobile device of choice and experience at your own pace. If you never quite studied all the literature you wanted to — or if you simply can’t get enough study of the stuff — pay a visit to our collection of over 50 free literature courses online. Some of them may even cover the same textual ground as the classes you felt curious about taking in college but could never quite fit into your schedule: “Dante in Translation” (Free Online Video — Free iTunes Audio - Free iTunes Video — Course Materials), for instance, or “Introduction to Theory of Literature” (Free Online Video — Free iTunes Audio – Free iTunes Video — Course Materials), or “Introduction to World Literature (Free Online Video).
Our collection offers courses with relatively broad literary subject matter, such as “American Passages: A Literary Survey” (Free Online Video) and “Contemporary Literature” (Free Online Video – Free Video Download), and others specific to one period or even one writer, like “Oscar Wilde” (Free Online Audio ). and the Allen Ginsberg-taught “Jack Kerouac” (Free Online Audio Part 1 and Part 2). Other offerings in our collection more closely resemble the courses you may have always wanted to take, but never found offered, like these from “Tolkien Professor” Corey Olsen:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Some year later, in 1991, the BBC dramatized eight stories from Bradbury’s collection. Adapted by Lawrence Gilbert, the stories were performed by a full cast and aired on the radio. The audio, running almost two hours, can be streamed below thanks to Archive.org. It’s otherwise housed in our collection of 550 Free Audio Books. Enjoy.
Below we have some other radio dramatizations of sci-fi/dystopian classics.
David Lynch’s cult masterpiece Eraserhead freaked me out the first time I watched it back in high school. Few movies I’ve seen managed to operate so purely on dream logic, and fewer still had such an ability to stir the murky waters of my subconscious. And though the movie gave me nightmares, I was strangely drawn to the film. So I watched it again. And again. By the tenth or so viewing, I found myself laughing as if I were watching a Will Ferrell movie. Eraserhead might evoke all kinds of half-understood primal fears but it is also pretty damned funny.
That thread of black comedy extends in one form or another through all of Lynch’s work, from Frank Booth’s profane insistence on Pabst Blue Ribbon in Blue Velvet to the bumbling hitman who accidentally shoots a woman in the ass in Mulholland Drive. Lynch, like Hitchcock before him, realized that the horrible and the hilarious are, depending on your perspective, a hair’s width apart.
After the Mulholland Drive, Lynch became disenchanted with making movies while at the same time he grew intrigued by the possibilities offered by cheap digital cameras and the internet. In 2002, he made the animated series Dumbland, which Lynch himself called “very stupid, very crude.” Indeed, the simple black and white line drawings of Dumbland make Beavis and Butthead look like something out of Hayao Miyazaki. Lynch did everything himself, including all the voices.
Each short, which lasts around 3 minutes, centers on Randy — a semi-feral, prodigiously flatulent beast of a man who is just as likely to shout profanities at you as punch you in the face. Basically, think Homer Simpson meets Frank Booth. He lives with his unnamed wife, who looks like she’s always on the brink of mental collapse, and his young son. And since this is a David Lynch production, motives are unexplained, the atmosphere is filled with menace, and the dialogue is pregnant with a subtext that is utterly obscure.
The first episode, which you can see above (and be warned, there is a lot of swearing), shows Randy staring covetously at his neighbor’s shed before barking at a helicopter hovering overhead. His reedy neighbor reveals that he’s missing a limb and has some unusual sexual proclivities. The episode is absurd, disquieting and pretty funny. You can see the rest of the series here (or here). You can watch it all in about a half hour.
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.
May 31, 1889, Walt Whitman’s seventieth birthday, occasioned a celebration of the poet in his hometown of Camden, New Jersey, with a several course dinner called “The Feast of Reason” followed by a program called “The Flow of Soul,” a succession of testimonial speeches and readings by prominent politicians and a few minor literary figures. Whitman himself was in ill health, but he managed to attend during dessert, deliver a brief response, then stay for over two hours afterward (see the event’s original program, with menu, here). While the event itself, writes Ed Folsom in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, was intended as a “local celebration of Camden’s most famous personality,” the occasion prompted admirers worldwide to send birthday wishes by wire and letter. Some of the famous literary figures who wrote included John Addington Symonds, William Dean Howells, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Mark Twain.
Twain’s letter (first page above) is not only a deeply heartfelt appreciation of the greatest living American poet, it is also, as Letters of Note puts it, “a love letter to human endeavor.” Twain enumerates with awe the astounding technological advances Whitman has witnessed in his lifetime, from steam power to photography to electric light. The letter is characteristic of the optimism of the age—so perfectly captured a little over a decade later in Henry Adams’ memoir chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Twain, hardly a religious man, evinces an almost rapturous faith in progress, concluding with a Biblical allusion and a somewhat obscure reference to an apocalyptic figure—“him for whom the earth was made”—who would appear in thirty years time. One can’t help but think, in hindsight, of Yeats’ 1919 occult meditation on the loss of that Victorian certainty in “The Second Coming.” As Marc L. Roark observes at The Literary Table, “Twain was correct — thirty years from the letter would see technology like the world never knew. Unfortunately, that technology was that of war.”
Hartford, May 24/89
To Walt Whitman:
You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world’s history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.
What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen the monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence & attention to business, but isn’t connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen much — but tarry yet a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last! — & still growing, visibly growing while you look. In that day, who that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege not attainable by his neighbor, let him procure his slippers & get ready to dance, for there is going to be music. Abide, & see these things! Thirty of us who honor & love you, offer the opportunity. We have among us 600 years, good & sound, left in the bank of life. Take 30 of them — the richest birth-day gift ever offered to poet in this world — & sit down & wait. Wait till you see that great figure appear, & catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was made, & that he will proclaim that human wheat is worth more than human tares, & proceed to organize human values on that basis.
Mark Twain
See Letters of Note for the remaining images of Twain’s letter. You can peruse all of the speeches, letters, and telegrams addressed to Whitman on his 70th birthday in the collection Camden’s Compliment to Walt Whitman, published that same year.
The Church of Scientology has a number of fascinatingly distinctive characteristics, including but not limited to its foundation by a science-fiction novelist. That novelist, a certain L. Ron Hubbard, launched his religion in the America of the 1950s, a prosperous place in a Space Age decade when all things science-fictional enjoyed a perhaps unprecedented popularity. Another big mainstream sci-fi wave would wash over the country in the late 1970s and early 80s, when, as Nathan Rabin puts it at Slate, “thanks to the popularity of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and theStar Wars and Star Trek franchises, space was the place and science fiction was the hottest genre around. Scientology wanted in, so an ambitious plan was hatched: Hubbard’s epic 1982 Battlefield Earth novel, to be followed by Space Jazz,” an album containing a “sonic space opera” based on the novel. At the top of post, you can hear the track “Earth, My Beautiful Home,” one of the project’s few un-bombastic numbers, and one performed by a genuinely more-than-credible jazz pianist, Chick Corea.
The Church of Scientology counts Corea as a member, as it then did another of Space Jazz’s guest players, bassist (and Corea’s Return to Forever bandmate) Stanley Clarke. This puts the album into the unusual class of works both written and performed by Scientologists, a group which also includes Battlefield Earth’s much later, John Travolta-starring cinematic adaptation, now known as one of the most notable flops in film history. Rabin, in his article, also covers several other albums credited to Hubbard, including 1986’s posthumous Mission Earth, recorded by multi-instrumentalist/Scientologist Edgar Winter, which he calls the only one “that could conceivably be played on the radio without prompting confused cries of, ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’ and ‘Is this even music?’ ” Some say science fiction has undergone another boom in recent years, but alas, we still await the great Scientological concept album of the 21st century.
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