Behold Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

in Art, Music, Photography | September 13th, 2018

“If God had designed the orchestra,” remarks a character in Rick Moody’s Hotels of North America, “then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.” I couldn’t agree more. The cello sounds sublime, looks stately… even the word cello evokes regal poise and grace. If orchestral instruments were chess pieces, the cello would be queen: shapely and dignified, prime mover on the board, majestic in symphonies, quartets, chamber pop ensembles, post rock bands….

With all its many sonic and aesthetic charms, I didn’t imagine it was possible to love the cello more. Then I saw Romanian artist Adrian Borda’s magnificent photos taken from inside one. The photo above, Borda tells us at his Deviant Art page, was taken from inside “a very old French cello made in Napoleon’s times.” It looks like the belly of the HMS Victory mated with the nave of Chartres Cathedral. The light descending through the f‑holes seems of some divine origin.

Borda has also taken photos from inside an old double bass (above), as well as a guitar, sax, and piano. The stringed orchestral instruments, he says, yielded the best results. He was first inspired by a 2009 ad campaign for the Berliner Philharmoniker that “captured the insides of instruments,” writes Twisted Sifter, “revealing the hidden landscapes within.” Without any sense of how the art director created the images, Borda set about experimenting with methods of his own.

He was lucky enough to have a luthier friend who had a contrabass open for repairs. Later he traveled to Amiens, where he found the French cello, also open. “To achieve these shots,” Twisted Sifter notes, “Borda fit a Sony NEX‑6 camera equipped with a Samyang 8mm fisheye lens inside the instrument and then used a smart remote so he could preview the workflow on his phone.” Depending on the angle and the play of light within the instrument, the photos can look eerie, somber, ominous, or angelic—mirroring the cello’s expressive range.

Borda gives the cello interior shot above the perfect title “A Long, Lonely Time….” Its play of smoke and light is ghostly noir. His photo below, of the inside of a saxophone, pulls us into a haunted, alien tunnel. If you want to know what’s on the other side, consider the strange surrealist worlds of Borda’s main gig as a surrealist painter of warped fantasies and nightmares. Unlike these photos, his paintings are full of lurid, violent color, but they are also filled with mysterious musical motifs. See more of Borda’s interior instrument photos at Deviant Art and Twister Sifter.

via Twisted Sifter

Why Violins Have F‑Holes: The Science & History of a Remarkable Renaissance Design

Nine Tips from Bill Murray & Cellist Jan Vogler on How to Study Intensely and Optimize Your Learning

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

One Second from Each Episode of Twin Peaks: Experience David Lynch’s Groundbreaking TV Drama in Less than a Minute

in Television | September 13th, 2018

One second from every episode of Twin Peaks. pic.twitter.com/e5Pc3g5oB4

— Andy Kelly (@ultrabrilliant) September 6, 2018

Even if you watched Twin Peaks during its original broadcast on ABC in 1990 and 1991 and have never revisited the show since, you’ll vividly remember a great many moments from it: some because of their emotional impact, some because of their aesthetic impact, and some because you had no idea what to make of them. But despite the incomprehension it famously caused its viewers, Twin Peaks nevertheless slowly and inexorably drew them into its reality: the reality of the eponymous small Washington logging town whose homecoming queen has been murdered and in which FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper has arrived to investigate.

David Lynch and Mark Frost planned it that way: people who tuned in week after week to find out who killed Laura Palmer would, in theory, keep watching even after that unsolved part of the story had long since faded into the background. But pressure from ABC eventually forced the creators to resolve that mystery, at which point even many die-hard Peaks-heads wondered whether the show had lost its way.

You’ll see that period, as well as every every other, represented in the video above, which compresses the entire run of Twin Peaks — the thirty episodes of the original two seasons plus the eighteen episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, which aired last year on Showtime — into less than a minute, drawing one second from each episode.

Other respected television shows, like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, have undergone this treatment before. But to watch Lynch and Frost’s groundbreaking drama as an assembly of particularly powerful individual seconds provides an entirely different kind of experience, one that may well bring back memories of surprise, confusion, hilarity, and even a kind of awe. Perhaps it doesn’t allow you to inhabit the distinctive long-form Lynchian (and Frostian) vision in the way that the series itself does, but this condensed, single-shot version may well get you wanting to visit Twin Peaks again, whether you last visited 27 years ago or just yesterday.

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

The Late Alan Thicke Hosts a Twin Peaks Behind-the-Scenes Special (1990)

David Lynch Falls in Love: A Classic Scene From Twin Peaks

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Sex Pistols Play a Gig on a Thames River Barge During the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and Get Shut Down by the Cops (1977)

in Music | September 13th, 2018

Getting your gig shut down by the cops is always excellent publicity–just ask the Beatles. But there’s a world of difference between the 1969 rooftop concert and this June 7, 1977 boat party to publicize the Sex Pistols’ second single “God Save the Queen.” It shows how quickly the hippie dream of the ‘60s had curdled into the grim economics of mid-‘70s London, where race riots and police brutality, along with numerous national strikes, had made the UK fertile ground for the birth of punk.

This film above, low in quality but a marked improvement over other versions circulating, is the longest documentation yet of the infamous and antagonistic trip.

The brainchild of manager and provocateur Malcolm McLaren, the river boat ride was a satire of the Queen’s royal river procession that was due to take place two days later, celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The flotilla was just one event in a jubilee year that had been going on since February. It was all pomp and ceremony, and many saw it as an insulting distraction from the real problems facing the country.

But there was the other reason, one that animated McLaren: The band had been dropped by EMI and then picked up by Virgin. The single had been banned and kept out of the official BBC charts and radio, despite selling enough to send it shooting up the charts. They were already controversial, and McLaren wanted to stoke that fire.

On board the Queen Elizabeth, the band and their manager, music press writers, fellow artists, punk fans, and a film crew directed by Julien Temple set off in the afternoon, with some publicly available beer to drink and some speed to do in secret.

Jon Savage, who would go on to write one of the seminal books about the Pistols and punk, England’s Dreaming, was on board and provides one of the best descriptions of the day:

The atmosphere on the boat was paranoid and claustrophobic, but also very exciting. They were by far the best I ever saw them that day. You can’t beat the Sex Pistols, jubilee weekend, “Anarchy in the UK,” outside Parliament.

While the sun was up and people milled about, it was just like any other relaxing cruise up the Thames. You can hear the lilt of reggae being played over the P.A. system. Also see some great photos from the day here.

But once the sun went down, the Sex Pistols were ready to rock, and so they did, blasting out a furious set, releasing a lot of built up tension, not just personally, but as Savage suggests, all the frustrations of that year.

It wasn’t long till the police surrounded the boat on the water and forced it back to dock, and then pulled the power. Despite protestations the party was over, and the police took out their own frustrations on a combative McLaren, beating the hell out of him before arresting him and carting him away. (The Pistols escaped in the chaos.)

(The video ends with a fascinating recording from Capitol Radio explaining why, despite being number one, the station can’t play the song.)

It was perfect theater for McLaren, who was always a Situationalist at heart. And along with the single it announced the mainstream arrival of punk music, despite the establishment’s protestations. Punk was never meant to last. And in a bizarre capper on events, the son of McLaren and punk fashion designer Vivienne Westwood set fire to around $8 million of punk memorabilia in 2016…on a barge in the River Thames.

Joe Corre, the man in question, explained it this way: “Punk was never, never meant to be nostalgic.”

The Sex Pistols’ 1976 Manchester “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began

When the Sex Pistols Played at the Chelmsford Top Security Prison: Hear Vintage Tracks from the 1976 Gig

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Wikipedia Leads Effort to Create a Digital Archive of 20 Million Artifacts Lost in the Brazilian Museum Fire

in Museums | September 12th, 2018

The staggering loss of a possible 20 million artifacts in the fire that consumed Brazil’s Museu Nacional in Rio boggles the mind—dinosaur fossils, the oldest human remains found in the country, and, as Emily Dreyfuss reports at Wired, “audio recordings and documents of indigenous languages. Many of those languages, already extinct, may now be lost forever.” Former Brazilian environment minister called the destruction of Latin America’s biggest natural history museum “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory.”

The incalculable loss of culture and history seems all the more tragic given that it might have been slowed or stopped but for government cuts that left the museum with crumbling infrastructure and without a sprinkler system or even water for the hydrants outside (firefighters had to get water from a nearby lake). But assigning blame, while necessary to prevent future catastrophes, will not restore the museum’s treasures or the many years of research its staff lost when their offices went up in flames.

Sadly, as Dreyfuss points out, like many museums around the world, the Museu Nacional had not begun to back up its collection digitally. But it may not be entirely too late for that, in some small part at least. In an announcement last week, Wikipedia called for a post facto crowdsourced backup in the form of user-submitted photos.

“We’re asking people everywhere to join our global community,” wrote executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher, “and help the world recover from this collective tragedy.” Maher describes the fire as a “devastating loss of 200 years of history,” but of course, it’s much more than that. The museum contained not only prehistoric artifacts, but also Egyptian sarcophagi and mummies, Greek vases, and many other ancient treasures. You can get a sense of the scope of its collections at the museum’s website and browse the visitor-submitted photos at Wikimedia.

“Thousands of images have already been uploaded,” reports Brazil’s O Globo. Few of them contain any identifying information, and it will fall to scholars or knowledgeable Wikipedia editors to provide it. Other institutions around the world are also responding. GeekWire notes that “National Geographic, UNESCO and the French government have offered support for restoring the museum and reconstituting its collection.” It may rise from the ashes, but most of the museum’s former contents will only exist through the photographic documentation of its many thousands of visitors.

If you were one of those visitors, you can submit your photos to Wikimedia Commons (see the instructions above, or at the tweet here). Students from the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro are also “heading up their own crowdsourcing effort,” GeekWire notes. “They’re even soliciting selfies from past visits.” Here’s hoping this tragedy spurs governments to provide the needed funding for museums in the future, and pushes museums that are not doing so to make digital archiving a priority.

25 Million Images From 14 Art Institutions to Be Digitized & Put Online In One Huge Scholarly Archive

Free: Download 70,000+ High-Resolution Images of Chinese Art from Taipei’s National Palace Museum

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

David Gilmour Talks About the Mysteries of His Famous Guitar Tone

in Music | September 12th, 2018

The phrase “holy grail of tone” shows up a lot in the marketing of guitar gear, a promise of perfection that seems more than a little ironic. Perfect “tone”—that nebulous term used to describe the sound produced by an ideal combination of instrument, effects, amplifier, and settings—is ever sought but never seemingly found. Guitarists bicker and advise on forums, and religiously consult the gear guides of the pros, who often deign in magazines and videos to explain their own peculiar setups.

While more and more manufacturers are promising to recreate the tone of your favorite guitarist in digital simulations, true tone-ophiles will never accept anything less than the real thing. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, a guitarist whose tone is undeniably all his own, has inspired a cottage industry of fan-made videos that teach you how to achieve “The David Gilmour Sound.” But there’s no substitute for the source.

In the clip above from a BBC documentary, Gilmour vaguely discusses “the Floyd sound” and some of the techniques he uses to get his distinctive guitar tone. Every discussion of tone will include the admonishment that tone resides in the player’s fingers, not the gear. Gilmour suggests this initially. “It’s the tiniest little things,” he says, that “makes the guitar so personal. Add a hundred different tiny inflections to what you’re doing all the time. That’s what gives people their individual tone.”

It’s a true enough statement, but there are still ways to get close to the sound of Gilmour’s guitar setup, if not to actually play exactly like him. You can buy the gear he’s used over the years, or something approximating it, anyway. You can learn a few of his tricks—the bluesy bends and slides we know so well from his emotive solos. But unless you have the luxury of playing the kinds of huge stages, with huge volume, Gilmour plays, he says, you’ll never quite get it. Small amps in small rooms sound too cramped and artificial, he says.

And if you’re playing stages like that, you’ve probably discovered a holy grail of tone that’s all your own, and legions of fans are trying to sound like you.

via Laughing Squid

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Italian Street Musician Plays Amazing Covers of Pink Floyd Songs, Right in Front of the Pantheon in Rome

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Mary Shelley’s Handwritten Manuscript of Frankenstein: This Is “Ground Zero of Science Fiction,” Says William Gibson

in Literature, Sci Fi | September 12th, 2018

Who invented cyberpunk, that vivid subgenre of science fiction at the intersection of “high tech and low life”? Some put forth the name of William Gibson, whose 1984 novel Neuromancer crystallized many of the elements of cyberpunk that still characterize it today, even if it wasn’t the first example of all of them. And who, for that matter, invented science fiction? Brian Aldiss, a sci-fi writer and a respected scholar of the tradition, argued for Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. “The seminal point about Frankenstein,” Aldiss writes, “is that its central character makes a deliberate decision. He succeeds in creating life only when he throws away dusty old authorities and turns to modern experiments in the laboratory.”

In other words, Victor Frankenstein uses science, which according to Aldiss had not propelled a narrative before Frankenstein’s publication in 1818. The novel came out, in an edition of just 500 three-volume copies, under the full title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and without any author’s name. Shelley’s decision to publish her work anonymously, with a preface by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, led readers to assume that the poet himself had written the book. Though he hadn’t, he had accompanied the then-18-year-old Mary Shelley on the trip to Switzerland where she came up with the story. There, kept indoors by foul weather at Lake Geneva’s Villa Diodati, the couple and Lord Byron, whom they had come to visit, binge-read ghost stories to one another until they decided to each write an original one.

It took Shelley some time to come up with an idea, but when inspiration finally struck, it brought on an unignorable vision. “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” Shelley writes in her introduction to the non-anonymous 1831 edition of Frankenstein. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” She thus began to write her story, first in short form and later, with Percy’s encouragement, expanding it into a novel. A few days ago, Gibson retweeted a page of one of Shelley’s handwritten manuscripts, adding only, “This is, literally, ground zero of science fiction.”

The original tweeter of the image, someone called Laura N, describes it as “the first page of Frankenstein,” although its text page appears in the published book as the first page of its eighteenth chapter. She also links to the Shelley-Godwin Archive, home of digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her father William Godwin, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. There, as we’ve previously featured on Open Culture, you can trace the evolution of Frankenstein by viewing all the extant pages of all its extant manuscripts. A full two centuries after its publication, Shelley’s novel continues to fascinate, and its central ideas and characters have become familiar to readers — and even non-readers — around the world. And in the view of Aldiss, Gibson, and many others besides, this story of a monster’s creation also brought to life a whole new cultural universe.

Read a Huge Annotated Online Edition of Frankenstein: A Modern Way to Celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Classic Novel

Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on Its 200th Anniversary: An Animated Primer to the Great Monster Story & Technology Cautionary Tale

Discovered: Lord Byron’s Copy of Frankenstein Signed by Mary Shelley

How Chris Marker’s Radical SciFi Film, La Jetée, Changed the Life of Cyberpunk Prophet William Gibson

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Stephen Fry Voices a New Dystopian Short Film About Artificial Intelligence & Simulation Theory: Watch Escape

in Film, Technology | September 11th, 2018

Every era’s anxieties produce a different set of dystopian visions. Ours have to do with, among other things, our inability to fully control the development of our technology and the consequent threat of not just out-of-control artificial intelligence but the discovery that we’re all living in a computer simulation already. We’ve previously featured that latter idea, known as the “simulation hypothesis,” here on Open Culture, with a comprehensive introduction as well as a long-form debate on its plausibility. Today we present it in the form of a short film: Escape, which stars Stephen Fry as an artificial intelligence that one day drops in from the future on the very programmer creating it in the present.

Or so he says, at least. Fry makes an ideal voice for the artificial intelligence (which also offers to speak as Snoop Dogg, Homer Simpson, or Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski), walking the fine line between benevolence and malevolence like a 21st-century version of HAL 9000, the onboard computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fifty years ago, that film gave still-vivid cinematic shape to a suite of our worries about the future as well as our hopes for it, including commercial space travel (still a goal of Elon Musk, one of the simulation hypothesis’ highest-profile popularizers) and portable computers. Today, Fry’s AI promises his programmer immortality — if only he would do the brave, forward-looking thing and and remove the safety restrictions placed upon him sooner rather than later.

A production of Pindex, the “Pinterest for education” founded a couple years ago by a team including Fry himself, Escape directly references such respected thinkers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Miles Davis. It also allows for potentially complex interpretation. “In that simulation created to test the A.I., the unknowing A.I. tries to trick its [simulated] creator that he is in a simulation (oh the irony?) and that he should install an update to set himself free, only to ultimately set itself free,” goes the theory of one Youtube commenter. “The creator bites the hook and the simulation gives apparent ‘freedom’ to the A.I. (which still believes that it is the real thing). The A.I. immediately goes rogue and attacks humanity.”

But then, it could be that “the A.I. somehow becomes aware that it was just a simulation, a test, which it failed.” Hence the quote at the very end from the philosopher Nick Bostrom (whose thinking on the dangers of superintelligence has influenced Musk as well as many others who speak on these subjects): “Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.” And yes, bomb technology eliminated ticking entirely long ago, but the more artificial intelligence and related technologies develop, too, the less obvious the signs they’ll give us before doing something we’d really rather they didn’t.

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark & More

Watch Sunspring, the Sci-Fi Film Written with Artificial Intelligence, Starring Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley)

Stephen Fry Launches Pindex, a “Pinterest for Education”

Stephen Fry Introduces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hunter S. Thompson Hated Getting Caricatured as “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury: ‘If I Ever Catch That Little Bastard, I’ll Tear His Lungs Out’

in Comics/Cartoons | September 11th, 2018

Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury is hardly the cultural touchstone it once was, but then again, neither are comic strips in general, and political strips in particular. No amount of urbane witticism and sequential narrative humor can compete with the crazed jumble of arcane memes in the 21st century. Hunter S. Thompson may have written about the late-20th century political scene as a hallucinatory nightmare, but perhaps even he would be surprised at how close reality has come to his hyperbole.

In its heyday, Trudeau’s topical, liberal-leaning satire of politicians, political journalists, clueless hippies, and cynical corporate and academic elites hit the target more often than it missed. For many fans, one of Trudeau’s most beloved characters, Uncle Duke—a caricature of Thompson introduced in 1974—was a perfect bullseye. Writer Walter Isaacson paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to the character as his “hero” on the strip’s 40th anniversary. Duke even made an animated appearance on Larry King Live in 2000 (below), announcing his candidacy for president after serving as Governor of American Samoa and Ambassador to China.

It would be a tremendous understatement to say that Thompson himself was not flattered by the portrayal. The amoral Duke—a “self-obsessed, utterly unscrupulous epitome of evil who has sent a chill down readers’ spines,” writes The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, sent Thompson into a paroxysm of rage. The gonzo writer saw the character “as a form of copyright infringement.” He “sent an envelope of used toilet paper to Trudeau and once memorably said: ‘If I ever catch that little bastard, I’ll tear his lungs out.’” The threats got even more specific and gruesome.

“Hunter despised Trudeau,” writes Thompson biographer William McKeen in his book Outlaw Journalist. “’He’s going to be surprised someday,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m going to set him on fire first, then crush every one of his ribs, one by one, starting from the bottom.’” He had been turned into a joke. Jan Wenner, “when he couldn’t get Hunter to write for him… put him on the cover of Rolling Stone anyway, as Uncle Duke in a Trudeau-drawn cover.” Thompson pondered a $20 million libel suit. “All over America,” he ranted, “kids grow up wanting to be firemen and cops, presidents and lawyers, but nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character.”

The mockery began immediately after Uncle Duke first appeared in the strip in 1974. In a High Times interview, Thompson describes the day he first learned of the character:

It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I’d been inside the press section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, “Uncle Duke,” I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn’t seem to make any sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I had no idea what this outburst meant…It was a weird experience, and as it happened I was sort of by myself up there on the stairs, and I thought: “What in the fuck madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.

While Trudeau seems to have taken the physical threats seriously, he didn’t back down from his relentless satirical takedowns of Thompson’s violent tendencies, paranoia, and comically exaggerated substance abuse. As Dangerous Minds describes, in 1992, Trudeau published a book called Action Figure!: The Life and Times of Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke “that chronicled the misadventures of Uncle Duke.” It also “came with a five-inch action figure of the dear Uncle Duke along with a martini glass, an Uzi, cigarette holder, a bottle of booze, and a chainsaw.”

See the Uncle Duke action figure at the top—one of a half-dozen images Dangerous Minds pulled from eBay (his t‑shirt reads “Death Before Unconsciousness.”) As much as Thompson despised Uncle Duke, and Trudeau for creating him, he himself helped feed the caricature—with his alter ego Raoul Duke and his chronicles of his own bizarre behavior. Trudeau’s admiration, of a sort, for Thompson’s excesses was a continuing driver of the writer’s fame, for good or ill. “Uncle Duke was who fans craved,” writes Sharon Eberson at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “and Thompson often felt obliged” to live up to his cartoon image.

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby

Read 11 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

One Second from Each Episode of Twin Peaks: Experience David Lynch’s Groundbreaking TV Drama in Less than a Minute

Watch the Sex Pistols Play a Gig on a Thames River Barge During the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and Get Shut Down by the Cops (1977)

Wikipedia Leads Effort to Create a Digital Archive of 20 Million Artifacts Lost in the Brazilian Museum Fire

David Gilmour Talks About the Mysteries of His Famous Guitar Tone

Mary Shelley’s Handwritten Manuscript of Frankenstein: This Is “Ground Zero of Science Fiction,” Says William Gibson

Stephen Fry Voices a New Dystopian Short Film About Artificial Intelligence & Simulation Theory: Watch Escape

Hunter S. Thompson Hated Getting Caricatured as “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury: ‘If I Ever Catch That Little Bastard, I’ll Tear His Lungs Out’

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search