Jonathan Barnbrook, the British graphic designer who created the cover art for several of David Bowie’s more recent albums, had his creative studio issue an announcement on Facebook today, one which will surely please many:
Barnbrook loved working with David Bowie, he was simply one of the most inspirational, kind people we have met. So in the spirit of openness and in remembrance of David we are releasing the artwork elements of his last album ★ (Blackstar) to download here free under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. That means you can make t‑shirts for yourself, use them for tattoos, put them up in your house to remember David by and adapt them too, but we would ask that you do not in any way create or sell commercial products with them or based on them.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
We all know the name Goethe — some of us even know the full name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I’ve never lived in the renowned 18th- and 19th-century writer, politician, and cultural polymath’s homeland of Germany, but even when I lived in Los Angeles, I regularly went to my local branch of the Goethe-Institute for German cultural events. Even in Korea, where I live now, Goethe has left a wide if shallow mark: you can see The Sorrows of Young Wertherin the form of an elaborate stage musical, for instance, and buy almost all the goods you need in life from the enormous conglomerate named after the young lady on whom Werther concentrates his doomed affections, Lotte.
But why, more than 180 years after Goethe’s death, does his name still come up in so many different contexts? And given that, why do so many of us know so little about his long, varied, colorful, and highly productive life and career? This sounds like a job for the video wing of Alain de Botton’s School of Life, whose short primers continue to bring us up to speed on why the legacies of so many cultural figures (with one section given over to the literary) have endured, or should endure. “Goethe is one of the great minds of European civilisation, though his work is largely unknown outside of the German speaking countries,” says de Botton in their video on Goethe: “He deserves our renewed attention.”
To fill out the details provided in the School of Life’s video, you can read an overview of Goethe’s career (including details on the proper pronunciation of his name) in the accompanying Book of Life entry online. It tells the story of not just Young Werther’s creator, but “one of Europe’s big cultural heroes – comparable to the likes of Shakespeare, Dante and Homer,” skilled in letters, of course, but also in “physiology, geology, botany and optics,” who also spent stretches of his career as “a diplomat, fashion guru, a senior civil servant, a pornographer, the head of a university, a fine artist, an adventurous traveller, the director of a theatre company and the head of a mining company.”
We might call Goethe, insofar as he developed his own mastery, spanning so much of the human experience, a Renaissance man out of time — but one who, in his way, outdid even the actual men of the Renaissance. “We have so much to learn from him,” adds the Book of Life. “We don’t often hear people declaring a wish to be a little more like ‘Goethe.’ But if we did, the world would be a more vibrant and humane place.”
The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech posted on its YouTube channel today a fun little video called “Anyone Can Quantum”–the “Anyone” probably referring to actor Paul Rudd, who takes on Stephen Hawking in a game of Quantum Chess, narrated by Keanu Reeves. Quantum Chess, a made-up thing, a gimmick, you say? Not so apparently. It’s a thing.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that certain entertainers did not arrive fully formed with their famous look already part of the act. It’s still weird to me, for example, to see very early George Carlin, looking like a nephew to the button-down comedy of Bob Newhart. You might get the same shock seeing this very early—possibly the first, but not verified—televised appearance of master tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
In this archived clip from Soviet television, the future opera superstar looks more like comedian Jackie Gleason than the bearded, iconic figure he would become. Those eyebrows are working overtime, though.
The year is 1964, only three years after his professional debut in a regional Italian opera house, where he played the lead, Rodolfo, in a production of La Boheme. It was also a year after his first major accomplishment, supporting and singing with Joan Sutherland on an Australian tour. He was yet to have an American premiere, and was still trying to make a name for himself.
This above clip, a jaunty and confident take on Verdi’s “La Donna e Mobile” from Rigoletto, shows all the youthful promise in his 29-year-old voice. Compare and contrast below his 1982 version from Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s film version of the opera. It’s sweeter and Pavarotti has less to prove, firmly established in the firmament of singing stars. The song remains the same, but this early glimpse into Pavarotti’s career shows he knew he was going places, but just needed that chance to prove it.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
You can now hear in full on the BBC’s website the first part of Stephen Hawking’s 2016 Reith Lecture—“Do Black Holes Have No Hair?” Just above, listen to Hawking’s lecture while you follow along with an animated chalkboard on which artist Andrew Park sketches out the key points in helpful images and diagrams. We alerted you to the coming lecture this past Tuesday, and we also pointed you toward the paper Hawking recently posted online, “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” co-authored with Malcolm J. Perry and Andrew Strominger. There, Hawking argues that black holes may indeed have “hair,” or waves of zero-energy particles that store information previously thought lost.
The article is tough going for anyone without a background in theoretical physics, but Hawking’s talk above makes these ideas approachable, without dumbing them down. He has a winning way of communicating with everyday examples and witticisms, and Park’s illustrations further help make sense of things. Hawking begins with a brief history of black hole theory, then builds slowly to his thesis: as the BBC puts it, rather than see black holes as “scary, destructive and dark he says if properly understood, they could unlock the deepest secrets of the cosmos.”
Hawking is introduced by BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley, who also chairs a question-and-answer session (in the full lecture audio) with a few select Radio 4 listeners whose questions Hawking chose from hundreds submitted to the BBC. Stay tuned for Part Two, which should come online shortly after Tuesday’s broadcast.
The short animated video above gives us a tantalizing excerpt from Hawking’s second talk. “If you feel you are in a black hole,” he says reassuringly, “don’t give up. There’s a way out.” That nice little aside is but one of many colorful ways Hawking has of expressing himself when discussing the theoretical physics of black holes, a subject that could turn deadly serious, and—speaking for myself—incomprehensible. As far as I know, black holes work in the real universe just like they do in Interstellar.
I kid, but there is, however, at least one way in which Christopher Nolan’s apocalyptic space fantasy with its improbably happy ending may not be total hokum: as Hawking theorizes above, certain particles (or anti-particles) may escape from a black hole, “to infinity,” he says, or “possibly to another universe.” The main idea, says Hawking, is that black holes “are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.” Or, in other words, “black holes ain’t as black as they are painted,” which also happens to be the title of his next talk. Stay tuned: we’ll bring you more of Hawking’s fascinating black hole theory soon.
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?,” asked T.S. Eliot in lines from his play “The Rock.”His prescient description of the dawning information age has inspired data scientists and their dissenters for decades. Thirty-six years after Eliot’s prophetic lament over “Endless invention, endless experiment,” futurist Alvin Toffler described the effects of information overload in his book Future Shock, and though many of his predictions haven’t aged well, his “prognosis,” writes Fast Company, “was more accurate than not.” Among his many “Tofflerisms” is one I believe Eliot would appreciate: “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”
Indeed, the exponential accumulation of data and information, and the incredible amount of ready access would make both men’s heads spin. Internet archives grow vaster and vaster, their contents an embarrassing richness of the world’s treasures, and a perhaps even greater store of its obscurities. Each week, it seems, we bring you news of one or two more open access databases filled with images, texts, films, recorded music. It can indeed be dizzying. And of all the archives I’ve surveyed, used in my own research, and presented to Open Culture readers, none has seemed to me vaster than Europeana Collections, a portal of “48,796,394 artworks, artefacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe,” sourced from well over 100 institutions such as The European Library, Europhoto, the National Library of Finland, University College Dublin, Museo Galileo, and many, many more, including contributions from the public at large. Where does one begin?
The possibilities may literally be endless, as the collection continues to expand at a rate far beyond the ability of any one person, or team of people, or entire research institute of people to match. It is easy to feel adrift in such a database as this, which stretches on like a Borgesian library, offering room after endless room of visual splendor, documentation, and interpretation. It is also easy to make discoveries, to meet people, stumble upon art, hear music, see photographs, learn histories you would never have encountered if you knew what you were looking for and knew exactly how to find it. Eliot warned us—and rightly so—of the dangers of information overload. But he neglected, in his puritanical way, to describe the pleasures, the minor epiphanies, the happy chance occurrences afforded us by the ever-expanding sea of information in which we swim. One can learn to navigate it, one can drift aimlessly, and one can, simultaneously, feel immensely overwhelmed.
This past weekend, Marvin Minksy, one of the founding fathers of computer science, passed away at the age of 88. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, The MIT Technology Reviewrecalls, “Minsky believed that the human mind was fundamentally no different than a computer, and he chose to focus on engineering intelligent machines, first at Lincoln Lab, and then later as a professor at MIT, where he cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1959 with another pioneer of the field, John McCarthy.” During the 1980s, Minsky published The Society of Mind, a seminal work which posited that there’s no essential difference between humans and machines, because humans are “actually machines of a kind whose brains are made up of many semiautonomous but unintelligent ‘agents’.” (Quote comes from this NYTimes obit, not Minsky directly).
Above, you can watch The Society of Mind taught as a free online course. Presented at MIT in 2011, Minsky takes you through his theories about how the human mind works, emphasizing “aspects of thinking that are so poorly understood that they are still considered to be more philosophical than scientific.” The goal, however, is to “replace ill-defined folk theories of ‘consciousness’, ‘self’ and ’emotion’ with more concrete computational concepts.” Lectures in the course include ones intriguingly called “Falling in Love,”“From Panic to Suffering,” and “Common Sense.” In addition to The Society of Mind, the course also centers around another book by Minsky, The Emotion Machine, which you can purchase online here.
In 1968, Mick Jagger and Michael Lindsay-Hogg—director of the Let It Be film and several promo music videos for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—sat down to brainstorm ideas for a full-length television production that would be unlike typical concert films. Lindsay-Hogg drew a circle on a piece of paper, and an idea was born for a rock and roll circus: two shows featuring the Stones, the Who, Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, and John Lennon’s supergroup Dirty Mac, with Yoko, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell, and Keith Richards on bass. That December, the bands played on a circus set in a London TV studio to a live audience.
Unhappy with the resulting footage, Jagger shelved the project, feeling like the Stones’ performance wasn’t up to snuff. (They went on early in the morning, and some say Jagger felt upstaged by the Who.) Some film of the concert made it into the 1979 documentary The Kids Are Alright, but much of it was lost until 1989, when it turned up in the Who’s private archive. The full concert film eventually premiered in 1996 at the New York Film Festival (and it’s now out on BluRay-see trailer below), where it appeared, wrote Janet Maslin, “straight out of its time capsule,” bringing back “the sleek young Stones in all their insolent glory, recalling a time when they ruled the roost.” Despite Jagger’s misgivings, they really did dominate that circus stage, but the event is notable for a number of other reasons.
Of course, there’s the Lennon supergroup, whose performance of his “Yer Blues,” sans Yoko (top) is “indispensable,” writes Allmusic. That’s no overstatement. Clapton’s sinuous leads and Mitch Mitchell’s busy fills sit beautifully with Lennon’s confident delivery. Rock and RollCircus also features the only filmed performance of soon-to-be Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi in his tenure with Jethro Tull (“arguably,” Maslin says, “the most unbearable band of their day.”)
As amazing as so many of these performances are (Taj Mahal’s “Ain’t That a Lot of Love” seriously rocks), as Maslin pointed out, the Stones “ruled the roost,” and they knew it, even if they had to go on at five in the morning to accommodate difficult setups between acts.
It just so happens that Rock and Roll Circus represents Brian Jones very last gig with the band. (It was not, as Ultimate Classic Rock reports, an earlier show at Empire Pool that May.) He looks particularly unenthused above playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the rest of the band looks exhausted as well—all except Jagger whose “fabulous performance,” Maslin writes, “nearly turns this into a one-man show.” Just above, see them do “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” introduced by Lennon in sign language (“one of two live renditions it ever got with Brian Jones in the lineup,” writes Allmusic). You can also see the barroom blues tune “Parachute Woman” here and below, a jumpy, funky “Sympathy for the Devil” (with Spanish subtitles).
To see the full concert—including the Who’s quick appearance, more Dirty Mac (with Yoko), and a bunch of sideshow extras—pick up a copy of the Rock and Roll Circus on BluRay.
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.
