We’re just days away from the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And, as we mentioned last week, the BBC has kicked off the celebrations with a series of videos that introduce you to the 60+ figures who appeared in the cardboard collage that graced the album’s iconic cover. Bob Dylan, Edgar Allan Poe, William S. Burroughs, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, HG Wells, Shirley Temple–they all get a video introduction, among others.
Historic as it is, the Pepper cover recently became a good vehicle for remembering the bewildering number of musicians, artists and celebrities who left this mortal coil in 2016. Above you can see an illustration created by Twitter user @christhebarker in the waning days of last year. If you look closely, you can see some thought went into the design. Muhammad Ali, for example, now stands where boxer Sonny Liston did in the original. Find them all in a larger format here.
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Have you prepared yourself to return, this Sunday, to Twin Peaks, that small Washington town, so well known for its coffee and cherry pie, once rocked by the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer? Fans of the eponymous television series, which first made surreal prime-time television history on ABC in 1990, have binge-watched and re-binge-watched its original two seasons in advance of the new Twin Peaks’ May 21st debut on Showtime. Even fans who disliked the second season, in which series creators David Lynch and Mark Frost gave in to network pressure to resolve the story of Palmer’s murder, have re-watched it, and with great excitement.
But can simply watching those first thirty episodes (and maybe the follow-up feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk withMe, once booed at Cannes, the very same festival which will screen the first two parts of the new Twin Peaks on the 25th) suffice?
To get yourself as deep into the show’s reality as possible, we recommend dipping into the Twin Peaks material we’ve posted over the years here at Open Culture, beginning with the four-hour video essay on the series’ making and mythology we featured just this past January. You can orient yourself by keeping an eye on Lynch’s hand-drawn map of the the town of Twin Peaks, which he used to pitch the show to ABC in the first place, and which appears just above.
But Twin Peaks has its foundation as much in music as in geography. Just above, you can hear composer Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent collaborator with Lynch, tell the story of how he and the director composed the show’s famous “Love Theme,” which not only made an impact on the televisual zeitgeist but set the tone for the everything to follow. “It’s the mood of the whole piece,” Lynch once said of the composition, “It is Twin Peaks.” Badalamenti has scored the new series as well, joining the long list of returnees to the project that includes not just Lynch and Frost, but Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and many others from the original cast as well, including the late Miguel Ferrer and Warren Frost.
“There’s so much more to Twin Peaks than a riveting murder mystery,” says Alan Thicke, another performer no longer with us, hosting the 1990 behind-the-scenes preview of the show’s second season just above. “There’s a whole look and a feel and a texture,” an experience “180 degrees away from anything else on television.” As dramatically as televisual possibilities have expanded over the past 27 years, it seems safe to say that the continuation of Twin Peaks, which comes after such expansions of its fictional universe as Frost’s Secret History of Twin Peaks, will maintain a similar creative distance from the rest of what’s on the air. “The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence,” to paraphrase David Foster Wallace writing about Lost Highway twenty years ago, is that the new Twin Peaks will be… Lynchian.
Above, you can watch a mini-season of Twin Peaks, which also doubles as a series of Japanese coffee commercials. They, too, come courtesy of David Lynch. And below, watch “Previously, on Twin Peaks…”, an abbreviated, 55-minute refresher on what happened during the first two seasons of the show. (It comes to us via WelcometoTwinPeaks.) Also you can read a recap of every episode over at The New York Times.
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I entered high school to the huge sounds of Soundgarden’s second album, Louder than Love, playing at home, in friends’ cars, on MTV’s 120 Minutes late at night.… The band’s debut, and two previous EPs released on Seattle’s Sub Pop records, had not attracted much notice outside of a fairly small scene. But Louder than Love—especially “Hands All Over”—was as hooky and alarming as breakthrough singles by other emerging bands on the other side of the country, while losing none of the propulsive grit, groove, and raw, metal/hardcore power of their earlier work. Thousands of new listeners started paying attention.
But there’s another reason the songs on Louder than Love resonated so strongly (and scored them a major label deal). The album announced singer Chris Cornell as a vocalist to be reckoned with—a singer with incredible power, melodic instinct, and a four-octave range.
On songs like “Hands All Over” and “Loud Love,” he broke away from a fairly narrow Ozzy Osbourne/Robert Plant style he’d cultivated and introduced a sound that took both influences in a direction neither had gone before, one full of anguish, urgency, and even menace.
Millions more got to know Cornell’s voice after Superunknown’s “Black Hole Sun,” but even then no one would have predicted the direction he would go in after leaving Soundgarden. He injected soul and sensitivity into songs like Audioslave’s “Original Fire” and “Be Yourself”—love ‘em or don’t—qualities we can hear in abundance in his covers of sensitive and soulful songs like Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” In his unplugged version of Jackson’s pop masterpiece the song acquires the heaviness and grievous beauty of a murder ballad. And I mean that entirely as a compliment. He brings “Nothing Compares 2 U” into “soulful new life,” as Slate writes, which is saying quite a lot, given that Sinead O’Connor’s version is more or less perfect.
Cornell took his own life at age 52 on Wednesday night after playing with a reunited Soundgarden in Detroit, and after struggling with depression for many years. It’s true he was never lauded as a songwriter of a Prince/Michael Jackson caliber. His lyrics were often tossed-off free associations rather than carefully crafted narratives. One’s appreciation for them is a matter of taste. But like the artists he covers here, both of whom also died tragically in their 50s, his music reflected a deep concern for the state of the world. This comes through clearly in songs like “Hands All Over,” “Hunger Strike,” and in some pointed comments he made during his final performance.
Rolling Stonehas a few more acoustic Cornell covers of Metallica, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, and more, and they’re all great. He did a profoundly affecting, gospel-like take on Whitney Houston’s belter, “I Will Always Love You.” But for a true, and truly heartbreaking, example of how he could imbue a song with his “unforgettable vulnerability,” watch him play Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2015 above, in an absolutely riveting duet with his daughter, Toni. Cornell will be dearly missed by everyone who knew him, and by the millions of people who were deeply moved by his voice.
Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion. And we have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible.
However true, that’s a particularly stress-inducing observation from one who was known for his Zen teachings…
The pressure is ameliorated somewhat by Bob McClay’s trippy time-based animation, above, narrated by Watts. Putting Mickey Mouse on the face of Big Ben must’ve gone over well with the countercultural youth who eagerly embraced Watts’ Eastern philosophy. And the tangible evidence of real live magic markers will prove a tonic to those who came of age before animation’s digital revolution.
The short originally aired as part of the early 70’s series,The Fine Art of Goofing Off, described by one of its creators, the humorist and sound artist, Henry Jacobs, as “Sesame Street for grown-ups.”
Time preoccupied both men.
One of Jacobs’ fake commercials on The Fine Art of Goofing Off involved a pitchman exhorting viewers to stop wasting time at idle pastimes: Log a few extra golden hours at the old grindstone.
A koan-like skit featured a gramophone through which a disembodied voice endlessly asks a stuffed dog, “Can you hear me?” (Jacobs named that as a personal favorite.)
And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word “now”; we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline on the watch. And as a result of this fabulous idea, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because the present is instantly vanishing — it goes so quickly. It is always becoming past. And we have the sensation, therefore, of our lives as something that is constantly flowing away from us. We are constantly losing time. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to be wasted. Time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of this thing, we feel that we have a past, and we know who we are in terms of our past. Nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were.
When it comes to films released by the Criterion Collection, we’d all struggle to narrow our favorites down to only ten, but we probably wouldn’t have quite as hard a time as Guillermo del Toro. The director of Mimic, Hellboy, and Pan’s Labyrinth characteristically takes it to another level, bemoaning the “unfair, arbitrary, and sadistic top ten practice,” crafting instead a series of “thematic/authorial pairings” (and in first place, a trifecta) for his Criterion “top-ten” feature. The list, whether he meant us to take it linearly or not, runs as follows:
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, High and Low, and Ran, the Emperor of Cinema’s “most operatic, pessimistic, and visually spectacular films.”
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Sealand Fanny and Alexander(theatrical version), which “have the primal pulse of a children’s fable told by an impossibly old and wise narrator, both “ripe with fantastical imagery and a sharp sense of the uncanny.”
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beastand Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, both of which “depend on sublime, almost ethereal, imagery to convey a sense of doom and loss: mad, fragile love clinging for dear life in a maelstrom of darkness.”
David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, two “epics of the spirit [ … ] plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings” and laced with passages that “skate the fine line between poetry and horror.”
Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and Brazil, the work of a “living treasure” who “understands that ‘bad taste’ is the ultimate declaration of independence from the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie” and tells stories in elaborate worlds “made coherent only by his undying faith in the tale he is telling.”
Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba and Kuroneko, a “perverse, sweaty double bill” fusing “horrors and desire, death and lust” that, when del Toro first saw them at age ten, “did some serious damage to my psyche.”
Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacusand Paths of Glory, which “speak eloquently about the scale of a man against the tide of history, and both raise the bar for every ‘historical’ film to follow.”
Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and Unfaithfully Yours, “masterful films full of mad energy and fireworks, but Sullivan’s Travels also manages to encapsulate one of the most intimate reflections about the role of the filmmaker as entertainer.”
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr and Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, the former “a memento mori, a stern reminder of death as the threshold of spiritual liberation” and the latter “the filmic equivalent of a hellish engraving by Bruegel or a painting by Bosch.”
Having already featured a tour of del Toro’s man cave and a tour of his imagination by way of his sketches here on Open Culture, it makes for a natural follow-up to offer this tour of his distinctive cinematic consciousness. A director since his childhood back in Mexico (then equipped with his dad’s Super 8, his own action figures, and a potato he once cast as a serial killer), he went on to study not filmmaking, strictly speaking, but makeup and special effects design. The resultant mastery of visual richness, especially in service of the grotesque, shows up even in his earliest available works, such as the 1987 short Geometria we posted a few years ago.
Del Toro’s next feature, a fantasy adventure set in Cold War America called The Shape of Waterandinvolving a fish-man locked away in a secret government facility, will no doubt make even more use of all the tastes the director’s favorite Criterion films have instilled in him: for grand spectacle, for freakishness, for the uncanny, for “mad, fragile love,” and for sheer disturbance. May he continue to do “serious damage” to the psyches of his own audiences for decades to come.
Philosophers, technologists, and futurists spend a good deal of time obsessing about the nature of reality. Recently, no small number of such people have come together to endorse the so-called “simulation argument,” the mind-boggling, sci-fi idea that everything we experience exists as a virtual performance inside a computer system more sophisticated than we could ever imagine. It’s a scenario right out of Philip K. Dick, and one Dick believed possible. It’s also, perhaps, terminally theoretical and impossible to verify.
So… where might the perplexed turn should they want to understand the world around them? Are we doomed to experience reality—as postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard thought—as nothing more than endless simulation? It’s a little old-fashioned, but maybe we could ask a scientist? One like physicist, science writer, educator Dominic Walliman, whose series of short videos offer to the layperson “maps” of physics, math, and, just above, chemistry.
Walliman’s ingenious teaching tools excel in conveying a tremendous amount of complex information in a comprehensive and intelligible way. We not only get an overview of each field’s intellectual history, but we see how the various subdisciplines interact.
One of the oddities of chemistry is that it was once just as much, if not more, concerned with what isn’t. Many of the tools and techniques of modern chemistry were developed by alchemists—magicians, essentially, whom we would see as charlatans even though they included in their number such towering intellects as Isaac Newton. Walliman does not get into this strange story, interesting as it is. Instead, he begins with a prehistory of sorts, pointing out that since humans started using fire, cooking, and working with metal we have been engaging in chemistry.
Then we’re launched right into the basic building blocks—the parts of the atom and the periodic table. If, like me, you passed high school chemistry by writing a song about the elements as a final project, you may be unlikely to remember the various types of chemical bonds and may never have heard of “Van der Waals bonding.” There’s an opportunity to look something up. And there’s nothing wrong with being a primarily auditory or visual learner. Walliman’s instruction does a real service for those who are.
Walliman moves through the basics briskly and into the differences between and uses of organic and inorganic chemistry. As the animation pulls back to reveal the full map, we see it is comprised of two halves: “rules of chemistry” and “areas of chemistry.” We do not get explanations for the extreme end of the latter category. Fields like “computational chemistry” are left unexplored, perhaps because they are too far outside Walliman’s expertise. One refreshing feature of the videos on his “Domain of Science” channel is their intellectual humility.
If you’ve enjoyed the physics and mathematics videos, for example, you should check back in with their Youtube pages, where Walliman has posted lists of corrections. He has a list as well on the chemistry video page. “I endeavour to be as accurate as possible in my videos,” he writes here, “but I am human and definitely don’t know everything, so there are sometimes mistakes. Also, due to the nature of my videos, there are bound to be oversimplifications.” It’s an admission that, from my perspective, should inspire more, not less, confidence in his instruction. Ideally, scientists should be driven by curiosity, not vanity, though that is also an all-too-human trait. (See many more maps, experiments, instructional videos, and talks on Walliman’s website.)
In the “Map of Physics,” you’ll note that we eventually reach a gaping “chasm of ignorance”—a place where no one has any idea what’s going on. Maybe this is where we reach the edges of the simulation. But most scientists, whether physicists, chemists, or mathematicians, would rather reserve judgment and keep building on what they know with some degree of certainty. You can see a full image of the “Map of Chemistry” further up, and purchase a poster version here.
The programming language Python takes its name from Monty Python (true story!), and now courses that teach Python are in very high demand. Last December, we featured a free Python course created by Google. Today, it’s a free Python course from MIT.
Designed for students with little or no programming experience, the course “aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals.” Beyond offering a primer on Python, the course offers an introduction to computer science itself.
The 38 lectures above were presented by MIT’s John Guttag. On this MIT website, you can find related course materials, including a syllabus and software. And if you’re interested in taking this course as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), you can sign up for the version that begins on May 27th over at edx.
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