Oxford’s Free Introduction to Philosophy: Stream 41 Lectures

in Online Courses, Philosophy | March 6th, 2018

You don’t need to go to Oxford to study phi­los­o­phy. Not when it will come to you. Above, find a playlist that fea­tures 41 lec­tures from Oxford’s course called Gen­er­al Phi­los­o­phy. Here’s what it has to offer:

A series of lec­tures deliv­ered by Peter Mil­li­can to first-year phi­los­o­phy stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford. The lec­tures com­prise of the 8‑week Gen­er­al Phi­los­o­phy course, deliv­ered to first year under­grad­u­ates. These lec­tures aim to pro­vide a thor­ough intro­duc­tion to many philo­soph­i­cal top­ics and to get stu­dents and oth­ers inter­est­ed in think­ing about key areas of phi­los­o­phy. Tak­ing a chrono­log­i­cal view of the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, each lec­ture is split into 3 or 4 sec­tions which out­line a par­tic­u­lar philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem and how dif­fer­ent philoso­phers have attempt­ed to resolve the issue. Indi­vid­u­als inter­est­ed in the ‘big’ ques­tions about life such as how we per­ceive the world, who we are in the world and whether we are free to act will find this series infor­ma­tive, com­pre­hen­sive and acces­si­ble.

Philoso­phers cov­ered in the course include Aris­to­tle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berke­ley and Hume.

The lec­tures can be accessed on YouTube, iTunes or the Web. Gen­er­al Phi­los­o­phy will be added to our list of 200+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Down­load 100 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es & Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale

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The Case for Writing in Coffee Shops: Why Malcolm Gladwell Does It, and You Should Too

in Food & Drink, Writing | March 6th, 2018

Pho­to by Kris Krüg via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I passed Mal­colm Glad­well on the street a few years ago, on the final stop of a road trip I took from Los Ange­les to Raleigh, North Car­oli­na. At the time I won­dered why the unmis­tak­able New York-based writer, speak­er, and inter­preter of big ideas had come to town. But now that I know a lit­tle bit about his per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al habits, I can at least say with some con­fi­dence where he was going: a cof­fee shop. That Glad­well’s work has, over the years, occa­sion­al­ly touched on the sub­ject of cof­fee sug­gests he may well enjoy a good brew, but in that same time he’s also stat­ed, explic­it­ly and repeat­ed­ly, that cafés are where he does the work itself.

“I loved the news­room,” Glad­well, who got his start in one, once told The Guardian. “When I left it I want­ed to recre­ate the news­room and the clos­est thing to a news­room is any kind of ran­dom active social space.” The best cof­fee shop offers what he calls “the right kind of dis­trac­tion. There has to be some sort of osmot­ic process,” just as hap­pens with jour­nal­ists togeth­er in the office. “I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly think cof­fee shops are amaz­ing places to write,” he more recent­ly said in a pod­cast inter­view with econ­o­mist Tyler Cowen (embed­ded below). “But I do think that sim­ply being around peo­ple who are not my age is real­ly use­ful.”

“The cof­fee-shop writer needs to be, as the soci­ol­o­gists would say, an out­lier and not a pio­neer,” Glad­well writes in the Wall Street Jour­nal. (Even in a per­son­al essay, it seems, he can’t resist apply­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic con­cept to every­day life.) “You don’t want to be the lap­top cow­boy who sig­nals to oth­er lap­top cow­boys that this is the place to be. You want the club that won’t have you as a mem­ber.” He goes on to rec­om­mend the rig­or­ous likes of Man­hat­tan’s lap­top-ban­ning Café Grumpy and Zurich’s La Stan­za: “no com­fy chairs, no Wi-Fi, no out­lets, and cof­fee so ridicu­lous­ly expen­sive that it func­tions as a tax on lin­ger­ing.”

Oth­er Glad­well-approved writ­ing cafés include Fer­nan­dez and Wells in Lon­don, Chez Prune in Paris (until, that is, it flood­ed with “Vas­sar girls with their Gitanes cig­a­rettes and their Thomas Mann”), and “the back booths in the Swan Restau­rant on Queen Street West” in Toron­to. These far-flung spots align well with the oth­er per­son­al writ­ing strat­e­gy Glad­well explained to Cowen: “I trav­el a lot. And that’s a real­ly, real­ly use­ful way of break­ing out of bad intel­lec­tu­al habits, and to remind your­self about what the rest of the world is like.” As a hard-writ­ing habitué of the cof­fee shops of Seoul, I sec­ond Glad­well’s advice, but I should note that fol­low­ing it won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly get you to his lev­el of pop­u­lar­i­ty and acclaim; com­bine it with his new Mas­ter­class on writ­ing, though, and hey, who knows.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mal­colm Glad­well to Teach His First Online Course: A Mas­ter Class on How to Turn Big Ideas into Pow­er­ful Sto­ries

Mal­colm Glad­well on Why Genius Takes Time: A Look at the Mak­ing of Elvis Costello’s “Depor­tee” & Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah”

Mal­colm Glad­well: What We Can Learn from Spaghet­ti Sauce

The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemi­an Cof­fee Bars Doc­u­ment­ed in a Vin­tage 1959 News­reel

Do You Speak Java Jive?: The Lan­guage of the Indie Cafes

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 Face­book.

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A Digital Archive of Heavy Metal, the Influential “Adult Fantasy Magazine” That Featured the Art of Moebius, H.R. Giger & More

in Magazines, Sci Fi | March 6th, 2018

In mak­ing a time cap­sule of the late 20th cen­tu­ry, one would be remiss if they did not include at least an issue or two of Heavy Met­al mag­a­zine. Yes, it spe­cial­ized in unapolo­get­i­cal­ly turn­ing women in met­al bras into sex objects. The glee­ful amount of T&A on its cov­ers, sur­round­ed by space­ships, swords, and sor­cery, mark it as a rel­ic of its era that appealed to a spe­cif­ic demo­graph­ic. But Heavy Met­al was much more than sexy sci-fi mas­cots drawn in lurid pulpy styles. Along with its share of erot­i­ca, the “adult illus­trat­ed fan­ta­sy mag­a­zine” pro­vid­ed a vivid show­case for some of the most inter­est­ing artists and sto­ry­tellers work­ing in the main­stream and in var­i­ous sub­gen­res of fan­ta­sy and sci-fi. (It con­tin­ues to do so.)

Debut­ing in 1977, the year of the first Star Wars film, Heavy Met­al was not named after the brand of gui­tar rock pio­neered by Led Zep­pelin and Black Sab­bath, though there’s an obvi­ous influ­ence, but after a French mag­a­zine that start­ed two years ear­li­er called Métal hurlant, or lit­er­al­ly “Howl­ing Met­al.” (We’ve fea­tured it here on OC before.) When pub­lish­er Leonard Mogel decid­ed to adapt the orig­i­nal for an Amer­i­can read­er­ship, he changed the name, but kept the con­tent, repub­lish­ing work by Jean Giraud—the artist bet­ter known as Moebius—and many oth­er accom­plished Euro­pean illus­tra­tors.

Found­ed and staffed by the cre­ators of Nation­al Lam­poon, the mag­a­zine lat­er fea­tured orig­i­nal work from artists like H.R. Giger, inter­views with Den­nis Hop­per, John Waters, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, John Car­pen­ter, Roger Cor­man, and even Fed­eri­co Felli­ni; and with musi­cians like the Eury­th­mics and Deb­bie Har­ry. It ran pop­u­lar seri­al­ized sto­ries, show­cased graph­ic lit­er­ary adap­ta­tions (of Par­adise Lost, for exam­ple), and pub­lished authors like Ray Brad­bury, Stephen King, and oth­er heav­ies. Rock, comics, film, and fic­tion all got their due in between the magazine’s extrav­a­gant pin­up cov­ers, many of which inspired the art paint­ed on the side of many a car­pet­ed van in the 70s.

You can see a siz­able col­lec­tion of scanned Heavy Met­al mag­a­zines, from the first, 1977 issue to the mid-90s, at the Inter­net Archive. Part of Archive.org’s exten­sive “Mag­a­zine Rack,” a dig­i­tal library of thou­sands of scanned peri­od­i­cals, the Heavy Met­al col­lec­tion was launched in 2012 by archivist Jason Scott. Though it doesn’t con­tain the magazine’s com­plete run by any means, it offers a broad enough sam­pling of all of its major themes and ten­den­cies.

Heavy Met­al’s inter­ests are very focused, one might say, but the few things the mag­a­zine does, and has done since 1977, it has done excep­tion­al­ly well. Enter the archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Dis­cov­er the First Hor­ror & Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine, Der Orchideen­garten, and Its Bizarre Art­work (1919–1921)

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

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

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Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online

in History, Music | March 5th, 2018

We have a ten­den­cy to regard Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart’s music as hav­ing emerged ful­ly formed into the world, not least because we hear it per­formed almost exclu­sive­ly in a high­ly pol­ished state of near-per­fec­tion. That makes any glimpse into the process of its cre­ation all the more valu­able, and the British Library has now pro­vid­ed us with much more than such a glimpse: at its site you can now read Mozart’s own thir­ty-page musi­cal diary, a record of “his com­po­si­tions in the last sev­en years of his life” and thus “a unique­ly impor­tant doc­u­ment” in the his­to­ry of clas­si­cal music.

The British Library notes that, dur­ing the peri­od from Feb­ru­ary 1784 until Decem­ber 1791 that the diary cov­ers, Mozart “com­posed many of his best-known works, includ­ing his five mature operas, sev­er­al of his most beau­ti­ful piano sonatas, and his last three great sym­phonies, as well as sev­er­al famous less­er works.”

The pages you see above and below this para­graph come from his com­ic opera The Mar­riage of Figaro. “It was a tur­bu­lent time of his life, with finan­cial crises, fam­i­ly tragedy, and his ongo­ing unsuc­cess­ful search for a per­ma­nent court posi­tion.” Enthu­si­asts will have tak­en notice that those years also con­sti­tut­ed the last sev­en of his life, before his ear­ly death at age 35.

But the flame that burns twice as bright, to coin a phrase, burns half as long, and we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture some of the for­mi­da­ble musi­cal accom­plish­ments Mozart attained before even reach­ing ado­les­cence. But it some­how feels even more of a won­der to see writ­ings in the actu­al hand of the mature Mozart, at the height of his com­po­si­tion­al pow­ers. You can read the musi­cal diary he wrote in two dif­fer­ent for­mats: as a stan­dard web site with details about the viewed pages and his­tor­i­cal con­text from Mozart’s life pro­vid­ed below each set of pages, and a zoomable, page-flip­pable brows­er with option­al audio notes. If you’d like a sound­track to go with the read­ing expe­ri­ence, a cer­tain 127-hour playlist of Mozart’s music sug­gests itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist

Hear the Pieces Mozart Com­posed When He Was Only Five Years Old

Read an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eye­wit­ness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extra­or­di­nary Musi­cal Skills

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepi­ano, the Instru­ment That Most Authen­ti­cal­ly Cap­tures the Sound of His Music

Leck Mich Im Arsch (“Kiss My Ass”): Lis­ten to Mozart’s Scat­o­log­i­cal Canon in B Flat (1782)

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 Face­book.

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Google Launches a Free Course on Artificial Intelligence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learning Crash Course”

in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Google, Online Courses | March 5th, 2018

As part of an effort to make Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence more com­pre­hen­si­ble to the broad­er pub­lic, Google has cre­at­ed an edu­ca­tion­al web­site Learn with Google AI, which includes, among oth­er things, a new online course called Machine Learn­ing Crash Course. The course pro­vides “exer­cis­es, inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tions, and instruc­tion­al videos that any­one can use to learn and prac­tice [Machine Learn­ing] con­cepts.” To date, more than 18,000 Googlers have enrolled in the course. And now it’s avail­able for every­one, every­where. You can sup­ple­ment it with oth­er AI cours­es found in the Relat­eds below.

Machine Learn­ing Crash Course will be added to our list of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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 Google Blog

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT

Google Launch­es Free Course on Deep Learn­ing: The Sci­ence of Teach­ing Com­put­ers How to Teach Them­selves

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course

 

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An Animated History of Goth

in Music | March 5th, 2018

“Is your teen goth­ic?” Don’t laugh, it’s a seri­ous ques­tion. If your teen is a goth, there are a few paths avail­able to you, and not all of them good. Let’s con­sid­er some, shall we? You might, in the course of some research, come across a resource called the Par­ents Uni­ver­sal Resource Experts—or P.U.R.E.—which is not a par­o­dy Evan­gel­i­cal band invent­ed by DEVO. You will learn things like “the pre­dom­i­nant col­or of goth­ic cloth­ing is black” and “the goth­ic atti­tude is one of sad­ness and depres­sion.” So far, so total­ly unhelp­ful. This much is obvi­ous, but what should you do?

Sur­pris­ing­ly, P.U.R.E. goes high when oth­ers go low, and coun­sels that par­ents should accept their teen’s goth lifestyle, “espe­cial­ly if it is not harm­ing them.” Good advice. Even Oprah took the high road, sort of, in 1993, let­ting goth teen guest Jim calm­ly “shut down haters” who called him “depress­ing and weird,” one of the haters in ques­tion being his mom. Don’t try to change your goth teen, get to know them by learn­ing about the his­to­ry of goth your­self. Reach back to the his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary ori­gins with this video, dig deep in the crates with this under­ground playlist…

…or just get a quirky gen­er­al out­line of the basics in the Pitch­fork ani­mat­ed video above, which cov­ers the genre from its begin­nings before the inter­net, when it had a very spe­cif­ic set of ref­er­ences unlike such lat­er iter­a­tions as “90s Talk Show Goth,” “Mall Goth” and “Cyber­goth” (a sub­set which, on sec­ond thought, prob­a­bly war­rants an inter­ven­tion on the grounds of aes­thet­ic abuse). In the sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies, goth meant Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, The Cure, Bauhaus, The Damned, Joy Division—the biggest but by no means only names at the begin­ning of a dis­parate move­ment that arose nat­u­ral­ly from punk.

The Pitch­fork playlist above offers a thor­ough musi­cal overview of those ori­gins, reach­ing back to a true orig­i­nal, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, whose campy hor­ror schtick in “I Put a Spell on You” opened doors for Peter Murphy’s vamp­ing in “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” Lux Inte­ri­or’s spooky psy­chobil­ly deliv­ery, and for­mer gravedig­ger Dave Van­ian’s the­atri­cal per­sona. (The dead­pan teens in the video at the top cite Siouxsie Sioux and her band as the first goths, but many a fan will tell you it was The Damned). With­out the next cuts from the Doors and the Vel­vet Under­ground, we might not have had the Cure or Joy Divi­sion, among a few hun­dred oth­er goth and goth-like bands.

Then it’s the usu­al cat­e­chism of clas­sic goth rock any edu­cat­ed goth teen can rat­tle off at a momen­t’s notice: The Birth­day Par­ty, Soft Cell, Swans, Killing Joke, This Mor­tal Coil, Dia­man­da Galas, Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Coil. But per­haps your teen has only picked up the baton where the playlist leaves off, with late­com­ers (and arguably not-goth-at-all-but-ew-emo band) My Chem­i­cal Romance, or with the post-goth (if you will) Karin Driejer’s project Fever Ray? If so, con­sid­er imme­di­ate­ly sit­ting your teen down and play­ing all of these key tracks. They may hate you in the moment, but will sure­ly thank you lat­er. (Miss­ing here is Nico’s Mar­ble Index, an album so bleak, most goths can’t even sit through it).

But per­haps you are your­self an elder (I kid) goth par­ent of a bud­ding goth teen? If “suddenly”—as Elec­tron­ic Beats’ Daniel Jones writes in “Find­ing the Right Albums for Your Goth Teen”—“there’s this hor­ri­ble, weird ver­sion of you who’s slight­ly taller and dis­plays enough of your own par­tic­u­lar quirks that you can nev­er quite tell if you’re being sub­tly made fun of”? Well, first, let me just say to you, hap­py 42nd anniver­sary of goth! You’re wel­come. Next, you should fol­low Jones’ advice. Bypass the 80s and 90s, he says: “Just give that teen some Cocteau Twins and Coil and tell them nev­er to be like Mor­ris­sey.” We’ve got it cov­ered above (no Mor­ris­sey to be found).

Then you must intro­duce your teen to con­tem­po­rary goth art like the sin­is­ter dada cabaret work of for­mer 60’s heart­throb Scott Walk­er, the har­row­ing noise of Pruri­ent, doomy, sludgy met­al of Neu­ro­sis or Sunn O))), and the cav­ernous­ly scary riffage of Ash Bor­er (“Can you imag­ine being a teen and hear­ing the beau­ty of ‘Rest, You Are the Light­ning’ at the exact same time you get your peri­od or first pubic? Prob­a­bly you’d grow up to be a pro-skater.”) Go on, embrace your goth teen, but prob­a­bly not with your arms. Do it with Walker’s “The Day the ‘Con­d­u­ca­tor’ Died (An Xmas Song).” Show your teen you mean busi­ness, and, as one YouTube com­menter sug­gests, “put this on next time you have a din­ner par­ty and just stare at your guests.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“A Brief His­to­ry of Goths”: From the Goths, to Goth­ic Lit­er­a­ture, to Goth Music

Three-Hour Mix­tape Offers a Son­ic Intro­duc­tion to Under­ground Goth Music

Watch The Cure’s First TV Appear­ance in 1979 … Before The Band Acquired Its Sig­na­ture Goth Look

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

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Elton John Proves He Can Turn any Text into a Song: Watch Him Improvise with Lines from Henrik Ibsen’s Play, Peer Gynt

in Creativity, Literature, Music, Theatre | March 5th, 2018

I’m not a lyric writer. I get all my inspi­ra­tion from look­ing at the writ­ten page. — Elton John

Inspi­ra­tion is one thing. Act­ing on it is anoth­er. Sir Elton’s out­put seems to go beyond his mag­i­cal com­bi­na­tion of tal­ent, work eth­ic, and train­ing. He claims to have tak­en all of 30 min­utes to com­plete “Your Song.” In his 2005 appear­ance on Inside the Actor’s Stu­dio, excerpt­ed above, he passed his genius off as some­thing akin to a par­ty trick, call­ing on the audi­ence to pass up a book—any book—as source mate­r­i­al for an ins­ta-song.

Giv­en the num­ber of stu­dent actors in the audi­ence, it’s real­ly not so sur­pris­ing that the first vol­ume to hit the stage was Hen­rik Ibsen’s 1867 verse play Peer Gynt.

Magi­cians height­en the dra­ma by demand­ing absolute silence pri­or to a dif­fi­cult trick.

John swings the oth­er way. The result­ing impro­vised tune is all the more impres­sive for his off the cuff, raunchy text-based pat­ter. It’s hard to imag­ine Ibsen play­ing so fast and loose with lines like:

Every­thing spites me with a vengeance

Sky and water and those wicked moun­tains

Fog pour­ing out of the sky to con­found him

The water hurl­ing in to drown him

The moun­tains point­ing their rocks to fall-

And those peo­ple, all of them out for the kill!

Oh no, not to die!

I mustn’t lose him. The lout!

Why’s the dev­il have to tease him?

What might Metal­li­ca or Iron Maid­en have con­jured from such mate­r­i­al? In John’s hands, it becomes a lush, emo­tion­al­ly charged bal­lad, the moun­tains and fog apt metaphors.

In his book Inside Inside, host James Lip­ton names this as one of “the two most astound­ing impro­vi­sa­tions in the his­to­ry of Inside the Actors Stu­dio.” The oth­er was Robin Williams mak­ing mer­ry with a pink pash­mi­na shawl.

In a 2012 inter­view with NPR, John went into the nature of his col­lab­o­ra­tion with his long­time word man, Bernie Taupin. Unlike oth­er lyri­cists, Taupin does not think in terms of verse and cho­rus, leav­ing it to John to free the song from a wall of text:

It’s just a blank—well, not a blank, but it’s a piece of paper. In the old days, it was hand­writ­ten. Then it got typed. Then it got faxed. Now it gets emailed. And it’s no sug­ges­tions, noth­ing. And we’ve nev­er writ­ten in the same room. I don’t know if peo­ple know that. But he gives me the lyric, and I go away and write the song, and then come back and play it to him. And I’ve nev­er lost the enjoy­ment or the thrill of play­ing him the song that I’ve just writ­ten to his lyric.

If you’d like to fin­ish what John start­ed by fur­ther musi­cal­iz­ing Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the com­plete script can be read here. Or lis­ten to the 1946 radio adap­ta­tion star­ring Ralph Richard­son as Peer Gynt and Lau­rence Olivi­er as the Troll King and a but­ton-moul­der, below. Also above, you can watch John turn instruc­tions for using an oven (yes, that dai­ly appli­ance) into song.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Elton John Sings His Clas­sic Hit ‘Your Song’ Through the Years

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Enjoy a Blue­grass Per­for­mance of Elton John’s 1972 Hit, “Rock­et Man”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on March 20 for the sec­ond install­ment of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain at The Tank. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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David Lynch Teaches Typing: A New Interactive Comedy Game

in Comedy, Computer Science, Film, Games, How to Learn for Free, Technology, Television | March 2nd, 2018

Typ­ing pro­grams demand some patience on the part of the stu­dent, and David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing is no excep­tion.

You’ve got 90 sec­onds to get accli­mat­ed to the crud­dy flop­py disc-era graph­ics and the cacoph­o­nous voice of your instruc­tor, a dead ringer for FBI Deputy Direc­tor Gor­don Cole, the hard-of-hear­ing char­ac­ter direc­tor David Lynch played on his sem­i­nal ear­ly 90s series, Twin Peaks.

Things perk up about a minute and a half in, when stu­dents are instruct­ed to place their left ring fin­gers in an undu­lat­ing bug to the left of their key­boards.

That sec­ond “in”? Not a typo (though you’ll notice plen­ty of no doubt inten­tion­al boo-boos in the teacher’s pre-pro­grammed respons­es…)

The bug in ques­tion may well put you in mind of the mys­te­ri­ous baby in Lynch’s first fea­ture length film, 1977’s Eraser­head.

On the oth­er hand, it might not.

David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing is actu­al­ly a short inter­ac­tive com­e­dy game, and many of the mil­len­ni­al review­ers cov­er­ing that beat have had to play catch-up in order to catch the many nods to the director’s work con­tained there­in.

One of our favorites is the Apple-esque name of the program’s retro com­put­er, and we’ll wager that fre­quent Lynch col­lab­o­ra­tor, actor Kyle MacLach­lan, would agree.

Anoth­er ref­er­ence that has thus far elud­ed online gam­ing enthu­si­asts in their 20s is Mavis Bea­con Teach­es Typ­ing. Take a peek below at what the vir­tu­al typ­ing tutor’s graph­ics looked like around the time the orig­i­nal Twin Peaks aired to dis­cov­er the cre­ators of David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing’s oth­er inspi­ra­tion.

David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing is avail­able for free down­load here. If you’re anx­ious that doing so might open you up to a tech­ni­cal bug of night­mar­ish pro­por­tions, stick with watch­ing the play through at the top of the page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big Lebows­ki Reimag­ined as a Clas­sic 8‑Bit Video Game

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

“The Art of David Lynch”— How Rene Magritte, Edward Hop­per & Fran­cis Bacon Influ­enced David Lynch’s Cin­e­mat­ic Vision

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her March 20 in New York City for the sec­ond edi­tion of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, a low bud­get vari­ety show born of a 1920 man­u­al for Girl Scout Camp Direc­tors. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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