Visit a New Digital Archive of 2.2 Million Images from the First Hundred Years of Photography

in Photography | May 23rd, 2017

Loya: Val­ley of the Yosemite (The Sen­tinel), c. 1867 – c. 1872. Ead­weard Muy­bridge. Rijksmu­se­um. Pub­lic Domain.

Inter­est­ed in pho­tog­ra­phy? You’re in the right place. Over the years, we’ve com­piled free class­es on dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, hun­dreds of pho­tog­ra­phy lec­tures, cours­es on pho­tog­ra­phy appre­ci­a­tion, and doc­u­men­taries on famous greats like Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Edward West­on, and Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son. You can learn the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy in “five ani­mat­ed min­utes,” see the ven­er­a­ble art of tin­type recre­at­ed, and vis­it archives from the Sovi­et Union, the col­lec­tion of George East­man, and the work of pio­neer­ing motion pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ead­weard Muy­bridge (ani­mat­ed in 93 GIFs).

Still not enough? How about a dig­i­tal library of 2.2 mil­lion images from the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy? Euro­peana Col­lec­tions just launched its “lat­est the­mat­ic col­lec­tion,” Euro­peana Pho­tog­ra­phy, which, notes Dou­glas McCarthy at the site’s blog, “includes images and doc­u­ments from 50 Euro­pean insti­tu­tions in 34 dif­fer­ent coun­tries.”

Stun­ning land­scapes like that of Muybridge’s Loya: Val­ley of the Yosemite, above, and work from oth­er inno­va­tors like Julia Mar­garet Cameron, below, rep­re­sent high­lights of the archive’s dig­i­tal scans from the first 100 years of pho­tog­ra­phy.

Lilie, 1898–1903. Wil­helm Weimar. Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe Ham­burg, CC0

The col­lec­tion promis­es, “future exhi­bi­tions on spe­cif­ic themes… telling com­pelling sto­ries with stun­ning images.” Cur­rent­ly, you’ll find there themed “expo­si­tions” like “Indus­tri­al Pho­tog­ra­phy in the Machine Age” and “Vin­tage Post­cards of South­east­ern Europe,” among oth­ers. A gallery on “The Mag­ic Lantern” offers a tour of a pre-cin­e­ma enter­tain­ment tech­nol­o­gy. One on pho­tog­ra­ph­er Johan Wil­helm Weimar intro­duces view­ers to incred­i­bly strik­ing work from his 1901 Herbar­i­um.

The col­lec­tion is search­able, down­load­able, share­able, and you can choose from 23 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, includ­ing Eng­lish. Its mis­sion is inter­na­tion­al, but also very much built on the idea—some might say polit­i­cal fiction—of a cul­tur­al­ly uni­fied Europe, allow­ing peo­ple to “con­nect with their past, with fel­low Euro­pean cit­i­zens, explore remote eras and loca­tions, and bet­ter appre­ci­ate the val­ue of their con­ti­nen­tal, nation­al and local cul­tur­al her­itage.”

Grand Canal, Venice, 1929. Nico­la Per­scheid. Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe Ham­burg, CC0

Lofty goals, but one need no such larg­er pur­pose to sim­ply enjoy casu­al­ly brows­ing, and mak­ing the kind of odd dis­cov­er­ies one might on a con­ti­nen­tal walk­ing tour, with no par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tion in mind.

Vis­it the Euro­peana Pho­tog­ra­phy archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thou­sands of Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Down­load 437 Issues of Sovi­et Pho­to Mag­a­zine, the Sovi­et Union’s His­toric Pho­tog­ra­phy Jour­nal (1926–1991)

School of Visu­al Arts Presents 99 Hours of Free Pho­tog­ra­phy Lec­tures

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Famous Paintings Inspired Cinematic Shots in the Films of Tarantino, Gilliam, Hitchcock & More: A Big Supercut

in Art, Film | May 23rd, 2017

It’s no acci­dent that one of the best-known series of cin­e­ma-ana­lyz­ing video essays bears the title Every Frame a Paint­ing. When describ­ing the height of film’s visu­al poten­tial, we often draw metaphors from art his­to­ry, but the rela­tion­ship also goes in anoth­er direc­tion: more often than we might think, the film­mak­ers and their col­lab­o­ra­tors looked to the can­vas­es of the mas­ters for inspi­ra­tion in the first place. In this tril­o­gy of short video essays, “Film Meets Art,” “Film Meets Art II,” and “Film Meets Art III,” Vugar Efen­di high­lights some of the most strik­ing paint­ings-turned-shots in the work of, among oth­er auteurs, Alfred Hitch­cock, Ter­ry Gilliam, Quentin Taran­ti­no, and Paul Thomas Ander­son.

Efen­di, writes Slate’s Made­line Raynor in a post on the sec­ond install­ment, “places shots from films side by side with the paint­ings that inspired them. And once you see the pair­ings, you won’t be able to unsee them. Some of these are unmis­tak­able ref­er­ences — like Jean-Luc Godard­’s ode to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres — while oth­ers are more sub­tle.

Film­mak­ers have been recre­at­ing paint­ings since the days of silent film: the video’s ear­li­est exam­ple is 1927’s Metrop­o­lis.” More recent instances include Alex Colville’s To Prince Edward Island in Wes Ander­son­’s Moon­rise King­dom, and Thomas Gains­bor­ough’s The Blue Boy in Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Djan­go Unchained. While per­haps too obvi­ous for inclu­sion into these essays, Wim Wen­ders once sat­i­rized this process with a movie-with­in-a-movie recre­ation of Edward Hop­per’s Nighthawks in The End of Vio­lence.

Which painters do film­mak­ers most often turn to for mate­r­i­al? Efendi’s visu­al essays show us a fair few mem­o­rable and var­ied uses of Hop­per, whose paint­ings pos­sess a cin­e­mat­ic atmos­phere of their own, and also Magritte, pos­si­bly because his dream­like sen­si­bil­i­ty aligns well with that of cin­e­ma itself: L’empire des lumières in William Fried­kin’s The Exor­cist, La Robe du soir in Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light (win­ner of last year’s Best Pic­ture Oscar), and Archi­tec­ture au clair de Lune in Peter Weir’s The Tru­man Show. Weir’s work makes anoth­er appear­ance in the essays in the form of Pic­nic at Hang­ing Rock, a haunt­ing film based on a haunt­ing nov­el writ­ten in part out of fas­ci­na­tion with a haunt­ing paint­ing, William Ford’s At the Hang­ing Rock — whose imagery then made it back into the screen adap­ta­tion. It seems that art, be it on can­vas, film, or some medi­um yet unimag­ined, tells the sto­ry of civ­i­liza­tion in more ways than one.

via Slate and h/t Natal­ie

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

Watch the Trail­er for a “Ful­ly Paint­ed” Van Gogh Film: Fea­tures 12 Oil Paint­ings Per Sec­ond by 100+ Painters

Guer­ni­ca: Alain Resnais’ Haunt­ing Film on Picasso’s Paint­ing & the Crimes of the Span­ish Civ­il War

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

100,000 Free Art His­to­ry Texts Now Avail­able Online Thanks to the Get­ty Research Por­tal

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Lou Reed Creates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

in Music | May 22nd, 2017

If you want to write, most every writer will tell you, you’ve got to read, read, read, and read. “Read more than you write,” advis­es Teju Cole. Even great film­mak­ers like Wern­er Her­zog and Aki­ra Kura­sawa cite copi­ous read­ing as a pre­req­ui­site for their pri­mar­i­ly visu­al medi­um. But what about music? What advice might we hope to receive about the art of writ­ing mem­o­rable, cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant songs? Lis­ten, lis­ten, lis­ten, and lis­ten, per­haps.

One of the great­est of rock and roll greats, Lou Reed, had overt lit­er­ary ambi­tions, formed dur­ing his years as an Eng­lish major at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty, where he stud­ied under poet Del­more Schwartz. “Hubert Sel­by, William Bur­roughs, Allen Gins­berg and Del­more Schwartz,” he once told Spin, “To be able to achieve what they did, in such lit­tle space, using such sim­ple words. I thought if you could do what those writ­ers did and put it to drums and gui­tar, you’d have the great­est thing on earth.”

The­mat­i­cal­ly, Reed accom­plished this, bring­ing the same vio­lence, ten­der­ness, and street­wise deca­dence to his work as his lit­er­ary heroes did to theirs. But for­mal­ly, he drew on anoth­er bat­tery of influ­ences: clas­sic soul, doo wop, rhythm and blues, folk, jazz, and ear­ly rock and roll. Crib­bing from all these gen­res dur­ing his long career, Reed dis­played a seem­ing­ly effort­less mas­tery of arche­typ­al Amer­i­can pop music.

Unlike Leonard Cohen—another lit­er­ary song­writer drawn to life’s dark­er themes—Reed did not leave col­lege and start pub­lish­ing poet­ry. In 1964, he moved to New York to begin work as an in-house song­writer for Pick­wick Records, soak­ing up the music around him through his pores, trans­mut­ing it into his own warped take on ear­ly hits like his dance craze, “The Ostrich,” which includ­ed the line “put your head on the floor and have some­body step on it.”

As weird as Reed was even then, he wrote immense­ly catchy tunes and even­tu­al­ly inspired sev­er­al thou­sand punk, post-punk, alter­na­tive, and indie song­writ­ers with the nov­el idea that one could make dan­ger­ous, shock­ing music with sim­ple, catchy—even bubblegum—melodies. Per­haps no one had as great an effect on post-60s rock, but Reed’s own influ­ences drew solid­ly from the fifties and before, as par­tial­ly evi­denced in his own hand, in a scrawled list of “best albums of all time,” which he sub­mit­ted for a 1999 mag­a­zine inter­view.

1. Change of the Cen­tu­ry—Ornette Cole­man
2. Tilt—Scott Walk­er / Belle—Al Green / Any­thing by Jim­my Scott
3. Blood on the Tracks—Bob Dylan
4. Lit­tle Richard’s Spe­cial­ty Series
5. Hank Williams’ Sin­gles
6. Har­ry Smith Anthol­o­gy
7. Does Your House Have Lions—Roland Kirk
8. “Stay with Me Baby”—Lor­raine Elli­son
9. “Moth­er”—John Lennon
10.“Oh Super­man”—Lau­rie Ander­son & Unit­ed States

The list, tran­scribed above, includes the three-vol­ume Spe­cial­ty Ses­sions at num­ber 4, a com­pre­hen­sive omnibus of Lit­tle Richard hits. Below it is Hank Williams’ 3‑disc sin­gles col­lec­tion, and fur­ther down, at twice the size, Har­ry Smith’s enor­mous Anthol­o­gy of Amer­i­can Folk Music. By far, the bulk of Reed’s sug­ges­tions saw release before he ever put pen to paper and came up with “The Ostrich.” We’re just peek­ing into the six­ties with Ornette Cole­mans’ Change of the Cen­tu­ry, at num­ber one.

But you’ll also note that, tied at num­ber two with Al Green’s Belle and “Any­thing by Jim­my Scott” (mak­ing his list of ten come out to 13), we have Scott Walker’s bizarre, exper­i­men­tal 1995 mas­ter­piece Tilt (hear “Farmer in the City” fur­ther up), a return from obliv­ion for the reclu­sive six­ties croon­er and an album, writes All­mu­sic, “on a plateau some­where between Nico’s Mar­ble Index and Lou Reed’s Met­al Machine Music.” Ever mod­est (he once claimed, “my bull­shit is worth more than oth­er people’s dia­monds”), Reed was acute­ly aware of his own piv­otal place in 20th cen­tu­ry music, though he does refrain from list­ing one of his own records. He ends instead with the puls­ing, trance-like sin­gle “Oh Super­man,” by his roman­tic and musi­cal part­ner, Lau­rie Ander­son.

Who knows how seri­ous­ly Reed took this assign­ment, giv­en how much he could be “cir­cum­spect about the mate­ri­als and meth­ods of his art” in his often con­fronta­tion­al pub­lic state­ments. That same year, VH1 polled sev­er­al jour­nal­ists and “esteemed musi­cians,” writes the music chan­nel, on their choice of the 100 great­est songs of rock and roll. “Nat­u­ral­ly we approached Reed, who sent his choic­es back via fax. In true icon­o­clast form, instead of list­ing out his 100 favorite songs, he picked just eight.” Only two of the artists from his top ten appear here: Lor­raine Elli­son and Al Green. See his hand-writ­ten bal­lot above, and the eight songs list­ed below.

1. “Stay With Me” by Lor­raine Elli­son
2.“Out­cast” by Eddie and Ernie
3. “Lovin’ You Too Long” by Otis Red­ding
4. “Riv­er Deep Moun­tain High” by Ike & Tina Turn­er
5. + 6. “Geor­gia Boy” and “Belle” by Al Green
7. “That’s Alright Mama” by Elvis Pres­ley
8. “I Can’t Stand the Rain” by Ann Pee­bles

via @LouReed

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

Lou Reed and Lau­rie Anderson’s Three Rules for Liv­ing Well: A Short and Suc­cinct Life Phi­los­o­phy

Lou Reed Reads Del­more Schwartz’s Famous Sto­ry “In Dreams Begin Respon­si­bil­i­ties”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Meet Yasuke, Japan’s First Black Samurai Warrior

in Film, History | May 22nd, 2017

“His name was Yasuke. His height was 6 shaku 2 sun” — rough­ly six feet, two inch­es — “he was black, and his skin was like char­coal.” Those words come from the 16th-cen­tu­ry samu­rai Mat­su­daira Ieta­da, and they describe one of his col­leagues. Though we don’t know much detail about his life itself, we do know that there once lived a black samu­rai called Yasuke, a ver­sion of the name he had in Africa, prob­a­bly the then Por­tuguese Mozam­bique. Brought to Japan in 1579 by an Ital­ian Jesuit named Alessan­dro Valig­nano on a mis­sion-inspec­tion tour, Yasuke’s appear­ance in the cap­i­tal drew so much atten­tion that thrilled onlook­ers clam­bered over one anoth­er to get so much as a glimpse at this strange vis­i­tor with his unfath­omable stature and skin tone.

“His celebri­ty sta­tus soon piqued the curios­i­ty of Oda Nobuna­ga, a medieval Japan­ese war­lord who was striv­ing to uni­fy Japan and bring peace to a coun­try racked by civ­il war,” writes Ozy’s Leslie Nguyen-Okwu. “Nobuna­ga praised Yasuke’s strength and stature, describ­ing ‘his might as that of 10 men,’ and brought him on as his feu­dal body­guard.”

As many for­eign­ers in Japan still dis­cov­er today, the for­eign­er’s out­sider sta­tus there also has its ben­e­fits: “Nobuna­ga grew fond of Yasuke and treat­ed him like fam­i­ly as he earned his worth on the bat­tle­field and on patrol at Azuchi Cas­tle. In less than a year, Yasuke went from being a low­ly page to join­ing the upper ech­e­lons of Japan’s war­rior class, the samu­rai. Before long, Yasuke was speak­ing Japan­ese flu­ent­ly and rid­ing along­side Nobuna­ga in bat­tle.”

The leg­end of Yasuke ends soon after, in 1582, with Nobuna­ga’s fall at the hands of one of his own gen­er­als. That result­ed in the first and only black samu­rai’s exile, prob­a­bly to a Jesuit mis­sion in Kyoto, but Yasuke has lived on in the imag­i­na­tions of the last few gen­er­a­tions of Japan­ese read­ers, all of whom grew up with the award-win­ning chil­dren’s book Kuro-suke (kuro mean­ing “black” in Japan­ese) by Kurusu Yoshio. This illus­trat­ed ver­sion of Yasuke’s life sto­ry, though told with humor, ends, accord­ing to a site about the book, on a bit­ter­sweet note: the defeat­ed “Nobuna­ga kills him­self, and Kuro-suke is saved and sent to Nam­ban tem­ple. When he sleeps that night, he dreams of his par­ents in Africa. Kuro-suke cries silent­ly.”

What the sto­ry of Yasuke lacks in thor­ough his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion (though you can see a fair few pieces briefly cit­ed on the site of this doc­u­men­tary project) it more than makes up in fas­ci­na­tion, and some­how Hol­ly­wood, near­ly fif­teen years after Tom Cruise’s high-pro­file turn as a white samu­rai, has only just awok­en to its poten­tial. In March,  Hol­ly­wood Reporter announced that the film stu­dio Lion­s­gate “has tapped High­lander cre­ator Gre­go­ry Widen to script Black Samu­rai,” a “peri­od action dra­ma” based on the Yasuke leg­end. Widen’s con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ence in the out­sider-with-sword genre makes him an under­stand­able choice, but one has to won­der — should­n’t Quentin Taran­ti­no’s phone be ring­ing off the hook right about now?

via Ozy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Female Samu­rai War­riors Immor­tal­ized in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Pho­tos

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Leg­endary Japan­ese Author Yukio Mishi­ma Mus­es About the Samu­rai Code (Which Inspired His Hap­less 1970 Coup Attempt)

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Take a Trip Through the History of Modern Art with the Oscar-Winning Animation Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase

in Animation, Art | May 22nd, 2017

The artis­tic mor­ph­ing is already under­way before the very first frame of film­mak­er Joan Gratz’ 1992 Oscar-win­ning ani­ma­tion, Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case.

Most view­ers will rec­og­nize the title as a mashup of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s famous work and Mar­cel Duchamp’s mod­ernist clas­sic Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, No. 2.

What fol­lows is a con­stant­ly mor­ph­ing, chrono­log­i­cal trip through the his­to­ry of mod­ern art, begin­ning with Impres­sion­ism and pass­ing through Cubism and Sur­re­al­ism en route to Pop art and hyper-real­ism.

The seam­less tran­si­tions were cre­at­ed by painstak­ing­ly manip­u­lat­ing small pieces of oil-based mod­el­ing clay on a sol­id easel-mount­ed sur­face, a tech­nique Gratz devel­oped as an archi­tec­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon.

Van Gogh’s self-por­trait recon­fig­ures itself into Gaugin’s. Andy Warhol’s Gold Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe becomes Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman with Flow­ered Hat—a far trick­i­er tran­si­tion than had Gratz start­ed with Picasso’s 1941 Dora Maar au Chat, the orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion for Lichtenstein’s 1963 work.

As Gratz told Olivi­er Cotte, author of Secrets of Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion:

The tran­si­tions were the most inter­est­ing aspect of the work. A great deal of what they show con­sists of pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about the style of the paint­ings…. The rela­tion­ship between the images depends on the era, the artis­tic move­ment and the inter­con­nec­tion between the artists.

Thus the work is not just about cap­tur­ing the 55 select­ed images, but also their tex­ture, from the Expres­sion­ists’ thick impas­to to the post-painter­ly slick­ness of 60s pop artists.

The paint­ings were cho­sen over near­ly eight years of research and plan­ning, but not the minu­ti­ae of the tran­si­tions, as Gratz pre­ferred to impro­vise in front of the cam­era. Just as in more nar­ra­tive clay­ma­tions, each painstak­ing adjust­ment required her to stop and shoot a frame, a process that end­ed up tak­ing two-and-a-half years, fit in around Gratz’s sched­ule for such pay­ing gigs as Return to Oz and the fea­ture-length clay­ma­tion, The Adven­tures of Mark Twain.

Giv­en the spon­ta­neous nature of the trans­for­ma­tions from one paint­ing to the next, the exact length of the fin­ished film was impos­si­ble to pre­dict. When it was at last com­plete, com­pos­er Jamie Hag­ger­ty  and sound design­er Chel White were brought in to pro­vide fur­ther his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­text, via music, envi­ron­men­tal sounds, and con­spic­u­ous use of a digeri­doo.

See more of Gratz’s clay paint­ing tech­nique in the music video for Peter Gabriel’s “Dig­ging in the Dirt,” and ads for Coca-Cola and Microsoft.

Read Olivi­er Cotta’s analy­sis of Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case, includ­ing a longer inter­view with Joan Gratz here.

Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case will be added to our list of Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She’ll be appear­ing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul Young’s Faust 3.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Sgt. Pepper’s Album Cover Gets Reworked to Remember Icons Lost in 2016

in Life, Music | May 22nd, 2017

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.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

via Con­se­quence of Sound

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet the Icon­ic Fig­ures on the Cov­er of The Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band

How The Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cov­er Design For­ev­er

Jimi Hen­drix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band” for The Bea­t­les, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

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Twin Peaks Essentials to Get You Ready for the Debut of Season 3: A 55-Minute Refresher, Maps, Commercials & Behind-the-Scenes Footage & More

in Television | May 19th, 2017

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 with Me, 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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Hear 20 Min­utes of Mark Frost’s New Secret His­to­ry of Twin Peaks, the Book Fans Have Wait­ed 25 Years to Read

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Ange­lo Badala­men­ti Reveals How He and David Lynch Com­posed the Twin Peaks‘ “Love Theme”

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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36 eBooks on Computer Programming from O’Reilly Media: Free to Download and Read

in Computer Science, e-books, Technology | May 19th, 2017

This past week, we fea­tured a free course on the pro­gram­ming lan­guage Python, pre­sent­ed by MIT. A handy resource, to be sure.

And then it struck us that you might want to com­ple­ment that course with some of the 36 free ebooks on com­put­er pro­gram­ming from O’Reilly Media–of which 7 are ded­i­cat­ed to Python itself. Oth­er books focus on Java, C++, Swift, Soft­ware Archi­tec­ture, and more. See the list of pro­gram­ming books here.

If you’re look­ing for yet more free ebooks from O’Reilly Media, see the post in our archive: Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media.\

For more com­put­er sci­ence resources, see our col­lec­tions:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Free Text­books: Com­put­er Sci­ence

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Learn Python with a Free Online Course from MIT

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

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