Mythos: An Animation Retells Timeless Greek Myths with Abstract Modern Designs

in Animation | March 20th, 2019

Designer Stephen Kelleher and animator Chris Guyot present “Mythos,” an animation that tells timeless stories–Greek myths–with simple abstract designs. Here’s how they describe this project where the ancient unexpectedly meets the modern:

For centuries the Greek Myths have been used as cautionary tales and teaching tools for people both young and old. These stories convey deep wisdom about the human condition which continue to resonate with us. I wanted to honor these ancient stories by interpreting them in the age of the pixel and gif.

The challenge was to communicate these complex stories in the most minimal way possible while retaining their essence. By having each vignette loop seamlessly, the timeless and perennial nature of these stories are reinforced. Ultimately these animations serve as visual shorthand for ancient truths which are as relevant today as they were when first told.

Sisyphus:

After numerous transgressions, Zeus decided to punish the deceitful king Sisyphus once and for all by forcing him to push a huge enchanted boulder up a steep hill. As soon as he reached the top, the boulder would roll back down to the base of the hill, condemning Sisyphus to an eternity of frustrated labor.

Icarus:

King Minos imprisoned Icarus in a tower alongside his father, the master craftsman Daedalus. As a means of escape Daedalus created a set of wings made of feathers and wax for his son but warned him not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus did not however heed his father’s advice. His wings dissolved and Icarus fell into the sea below and drowned.

Persephone:

The daughter of Zeus and Demeter, Persephone was abducted by the god of the underworld Hades. Although Zeus intervened and brought her back to the land of the living, Persephone was bound to Hades for four months of each year. In her grief, Demeter would make the soils barren thereby creating winter while Persephone’s return would mark the start of the spring.

Narcissus:

As punishment for mortal Narcissus’ cruel treatment of the nymph Echo, he was cursed by Nemesis, the goddess of revenge. She led him to a pool where upon seeing his own reflection, he became besotted with his image and was unable to leave. Fixated, starving and in despair, he fell into the pool and drowned.

Midas:

Having done a great service for the god Dionysus, King Midas was granted one wish of his choosing. He wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. Upon turning food, water and even his own daughter to gold however, he soon realized his foolishness and prayed to Dionysus to undo his wish. Dionysus took pity on King Midas and duly undid the wish.

Theseus:

A Greek hero of many adventures, Theseus is best known for his defeat of the Minotaur. Under the decree of King Minos, every year fourteen young Atheneans were sacrificed to the Minotaur — a monstrous half bull, half man who resided deep within the Labyrinth. Not only was Theseus able to slay the Minotaur but he also successfully escaped the complex Labyrinth, solidifying his legend.

Enjoy…

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via Aeon

36 Abstract Covers of Vintage Psychology, Philosophy & Science Books Come to Life in a Mesmerizing Animation

Free Courses on Design from the Famous California Design Firm IDEO Start This Week

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David Lynch Teaches an Online Course on Film & Creativity

in Film, Online Courses | March 20th, 2019

How many of us became David Lynch fans while first watching one of his films? And how many of those fans also left filled with the desire to make a film themselves? Though the long-circulating term “Lynchian” puts a name to Lynch’s distinctively stimulating and disturbing cinematic style, it increasingly seems that no filmmaker, no matter how skilled, can quite pull off that style but Lynch himself. But even if you can never be the man who directed the likes of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive (and co-created the similarly inimitable television series Twin Peaks), you can still learn a great deal about filmmaking from him that you can’t learn from anyone else.

Now online education company MasterClass has made some of his knowledge easily accessible in the form of their new course “David Lynch Teaches Creativity and Film.” In Lynch’s world — unlike Hollywood in general — you can’t make a film without creativity. But of what does creativity consist? “Ideas are everything,” says Lynch in the trailer for his MasterClass above. “We’re nothing without an idea. So I go where the ideas lead.” He has long liked to make an analogy with fishing: you put a piece of bait on a hook, cast your line out into the world, and wait for an idea to bite. Different idea-fishing methods work for different people, and Lynch has spoken of his success with drinking a milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy every day for seven years, and even more so with decade after decade of twice-daily meditation.

However you fish for ideas, “you don’t know when they’re going to come or what will trigger them. Lo and behold, on a lucky day, bingo, you’ll catch an idea, and… party time.” Lynch also drops an unexpectedly practical piece of advice to do with all this in the trailer: “If you want to make a feature-length film, all you need to do is get 70 ideas.” Then you take those 70 ideas, write them on cards, and put the cards in order — and not necessarily in a narratively conventional order. “In cinema, I don’t like rules,” Lynch says, a statement that will surprise neither his boosters nor his detractors. He covers that territory in the eleventh lesson of his MasterClass, which explains the difference between “restrictions that stifle creativity from those that actually help you to think outside the box.” Other lessons get into “how to approach a blank page,” “how to identify and recognize the right performer for a part,” and “how David handles the pressures of the set while protecting a creative space for the cast and crew.”

A final “bonus chapter” offers Lynch’s views on transcendental meditation, a practice that has taught him “to approach life and work with deeper awareness” and “enjoy the ‘doing’ of almost any activity.” That sets “David Lynch Teaches Creativity and Film” apart from the other filmmaking courses Masterclass offers, taught by such an intellectually and aesthetically varied set of luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Ken Burns, Jodie Foster, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog. You can take all of those, and any other Masterclass besides, with the site’s “all-access pass,” or just this one course for $90. And even if you don’t, you’d do pretty well to take with you into your filmmaking career the words by which Lynch himself has clearly lived: “Never give up final cut and total creative freedom.” For a complete list of Masterclass courses, click here.

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Boosts Our Creativity (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Meditating)

How David Lynch Got Creative Inspiration? By Drinking a Milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Single Day, for Seven Straight Years

The Surreal Filmmaking of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987)

David Lynch Teaches Typing: A New Interactive Comedy Game

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 ) |

Christopher Hitches Makes the Case for Paying Reparations for Slavery in the United States

in Politics | March 20th, 2019

There may be no more heretical figure from the last several decades for both the current mainstream political left and right than the late Christopher Hitchens. He has maintained contrarian positions that range from vexing to enraging for nearly every orthodoxy. Contrarianism can seem his one singular consistency in a slide from “socialist to neocon” and some very imperialist views on war, race, culture, and religion. But his one true allegiance, he would say, was to “the principles of free inquiry” and Enlightenment thought.

Hitchens inquired freely and often, and he was a supremely polished rhetorician who had mastered the art of making arguments, regardless of whether he was persuaded by them himself. It may seem surprising that a crusader against “the race card in American politics” and “the perils of identity politics,” would make the case for reparations for slavery. But he does so in a 2001 Oxford-style debate at Boston University, a forum that requires no personal allegiance to the position.

This context aside, Hitchens’ argument is compelling on its own merits. “It matters not what you think,” he says in a classically liberal formula in his introductory remarks above, “it matters how you think.” He starts with an argument from analogy: with the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles, sections of the Parthenon taken from Greece in the 18th century. The acquisition of these artifacts was “an original crime,” says Hitchens, “a desecration of a great historic culture…. It was a theft, a rape, a taking, perpetrated by the strong upon the weak.”

This was, he says, “by the way… all done at the same time as the British fleet… was also the military guarantor of the slave trade.” Not every crime committed by the British Empire could be made good, but “this one could. Restitution could be made.” Upon publishing a book making this case for returning the Greek stones, Hitchens says he was “immediately impressed by the torrent of bad faith arguments in which I was doused… the irrelevant, the non-sequitur, the generalization.” Likewise, when the subject of reparations comes up, Hitches says he hears “a constant whine and drone” of bad faith.

To laughs from the audience, he cheekily calls counterarguments a “white whine.” On the subject of reparations, white Americans display “a rather nasty combination of self pity and self hatred,” he says, the workings of a “bad conscience.” He weaves his scorn for self-interest and flimsy reasoning into an extended analogy with looted artifacts in the British museum. Curiously, he does not seem to argue that Britain make restitution to the descendants of looted people, an obvious conclusion of his arguments for the U.S. But perhaps it comes up in the full debate from which these remarks come, just below.

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

W.E.B. Du Bois Creates Revolutionary, Artistic Data Visualizations Showing the Economic Plight of African-Americans (1900)

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

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Behold the Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, a Fantastical 1917 Mashup of Tales from Homer’s Odyssey, King Arthur, the Brothers Grimm & More

in Art, Literature | March 20th, 2019

For most of publishing history, books for children meant primers and preachy religious texts, not mythical worlds invented just for kids. It’s true that fairy tales may have been specifically targeted to the young, but they were never childish. (See the original Grimms’ tales.) By the 19th century, however, the situation had dramatically changed. And by the turn of the century, childlike fairy stories and fantasies enjoyed wide popularity among grown-ups and children alike, just as they do today. Witness the tremendous success of Peter Pan.

The character first appeared as a seven-day-old baby in a satirical 1902 fantasy novel by Scottish writer J.M. Barrie. The novel became a play. Pan was so beloved that Barrie’s publisher excerpted his chapters and published them as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

Then followed Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, in which baby Pan had grown up at least just a little. Only after this history of Pan entertainments did Barrie write Peter and Wendy, the story we learned as children through Disney adaptations or the 1911 original.

Pan’s influence is wide and deep, and over a century long. In 1917, one of the early adopters of Barrie’s Neverland fantasy concept expanded on its world with a version called “Fairyland,” described in an illustrated map of such a place. The artist, Bernard Sleigh, “begins with a stormy sea,” writes Jessica Leigh Hester at Atlas Obscura. (That is, if we read the map from left to right.) “There, waves lash the shore and tritons ride piscine steeds, while a wooden ship and an unfortunate soul are half-sunk nearby, in a white whirlpool.” The influence of J.M. Barrie’s descriptions is readily apparent.

The Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (see the map in full here) “mashes up dozens of stories to make a comprehensive geography of make-believe,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion: “Rapunzel’s tower, cheek by jowl with Belle’s palace from ‘Beauty and the Beast’; Humpty Dumpty on a roof, overlooking Red Riding Hood’s house; Ulysses’ ship, sailing past Goblin Land.” It’s a “Where’s Waldo of Fantasy Easter Eggs,” by an English landscape painter “who wrote extensively about fairies in England.” Sleigh was not only a fantasist, he was also a true believer.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Sleigh promoted the existence of fairies, and wrote an earnest work of fiction called The Gates of Horn: Being Sundry Records from the Proceedings of the Society for the Investigation of Fairy Fact and Fallacy in 1926. Like Doyle, he was a talented and popular artist looking for magic in a world of machinery. “The ancient map of Fairyland,” with its visual anthology of literature, folk tale, and mythology, “is said to have been his most famous work,” writes the David Rumsey Map Collection. It was designed “during the ‘Arts & Crafts’ movement, which was in reaction to the Industrial revolution.”

Like J.R.R. Tolkien, another artist who found inspiration in Barrie’s fantasy world, Sleigh worked against a backdrop of world war. Onion quotes historians Tim Bryars and Tom Harper’s comment that “compared with the devastated, bomb-blasted landscape of northern France, this vision of a make-believe land may have seemed a seductive escape for a European society bearing the psychological and physical scars of mass conflict.”

Unlike Tolkien, however, or contemporary inheritors of the Peter Pan tradition like J.K. Rowling a century later, or the earlier Romantic lovers of mythology and folk tale, Sleigh’s map invites a light reprieve from the horrors of war. “Any small amount of violence or trauma you might find in ‘Fairyland’ could easily be evaded,” writes Onion, “by moving on to the next area of the map, where a new set of stories unfolds.”

Download high resolution scans of An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland: newly discovered and set forth from the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Map Collection, where you can also purchase a print. (The map physically resides at the British Library.) Zoom into Fairyland’s intricate fantasy landscape and maybe take a break from the dark realities of yet another industrial revolution and a world at war.

via Atlas Obscura/The Vault

Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

A Digital Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

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

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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Civilization–and Recommends Ways to Ensure That It Survives (1978)

in Sci Fi | March 19th, 2019

When we talk about what could put an end to civilization today, we usually talk about climate change. The frightening scientific research behind that phenomenon has, apart from providing a seemingly infinite source of fuel for the blaze of countless political debates, also inspired a variety of dystopian visions, credible and otherwise, of no small number of science-fiction writers. One wonders what a science-fictional mind of, say, Isaac Asimov’s caliber would make of it. Asimov died in 1992, a few years before climate change attained the presence in the zeitgeist it has today, but we can still get a sense of his approach to thinking about these kinds of literally existential questions from his 1978 talk above.

When people talked about what could put an end to civilization in 1978, they talked about overpopulation. A decade earlier, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, whose early editions opened with these words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” With these and other grim pronouncements lodged in their minds, the bestselling book’s many readers saw humanity faced with a stark choice: let that death rate increase, or proactively lower the birth rate.

A decade later, Asimov frames the situation in the same basic terms, though he shows more optimism — or at least inventiveness — in addressing it, supported by the workings of his powerful imagination. This isn’t to say that the images he throws out are exactly utopian: he sees humanity, growing at then-current rates, ultimately housed in “one world-girdling skyscraper, partially apartment houses, partially factories, partially all kinds of things — schools, colleges — and the entire ocean taken out of its bed and placed on the roof, and growing algae or something like that. Because all those people will have to be fed, and the only way they can be fed is to allow no waste whatever.”

This necessity will be the mother of such inventions as “thick conduits leading down into the ocean water from which you take out the algae and all the other plankton, or whatever the heck it is, and you pound it and you separate it and you flavor it and you cook it, and finally you have your pseudo-steak and your mock veal and your healthful sub-vegetables and so on.” Where to get the nutrients to fertilize the growth of more algae? “Only from chopped-up corpses and human wastes.” It would probably interest Asimov, and certainly amuse him, to see how much research into algae-based food goes on here in the 21st century (let alone the popularity of an algae-utilizing meal replacement beverage called Soylent). But however delicious all those become, humanity will need more to live: energy, space, and yes, a comfortable ambient temperature.

Asimov’s suite of proposed solutions, the explanation of which he spins into high and often prescient entertainment, includes birth control, solar power, lunar mining, and the repurposing of some of the immense budget spent on “war machines.” The volume of applause in the room shows how heartily some agreed with him then, and perspectives like Asimov’s have drawn more adherents in the more than 40 years since, about a decade after Asimov confidently predicted that the world would run out of oil, a time when an increasing number of developed countries have begun to worry about their falling birthrates. But then, Asimov also imagined that Mount Everest was unconquerable because Martians lived on top of it in a story published a seven months after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it up there — a fact he made a rule of cheerfully admitting whenever he started with the predictions.

Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States: A Short, Scathing Essay from 1980

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Computerization, Global Co-operation, Leisure Time & Moon Mining

Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story “The Last Question” Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy

Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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.

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Virginia Woolf & Friends Name Their Favorite and Least Favorite Writers in a Newly Unearthed 1923 Survey

in Literature | March 19th, 2019

Celebrity Twitter can be fun… sometimes…. Tabloids still have mass appeal, albeit mainly on the web. But for those who want to see the introverted and bookish caught off-guard and off the cuff, times are a little tough. Writers can more easily control their image than actors or pop stars, naturally. Most aren’t nearly as recognizable and subject to constant pop culture surveillance. Literary scandals rarely go beyond plagiarism or politics. Sometimes one might wish—as in the days of mean drunks like Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, or Hunter S. Thompson—for a good old-fashioned literary brawl….

Or maybe not. After all, there’s that thing about pens and swords. The sharpest weapons, the tools that cut the deepest, are wielded by wit, whether it’s the flashing of rhetorical steel or the fine needling of elevated pettiness. No clumsy violence can stand up to the literary put-downs we find in the correspondence of, say Flannery O’Connor—who wrote that Ayn Rand “makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky”—or Virginia Woolf, who found Joyce “a bore… ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?”

This is wonderfully nasty stuff: gut-level low blows from the high road of a well-turned phrase. If it’s the kind of thing you enjoy, you’ll love the “bitchy literary burn book,” reports Vox, “featuring the unvarnished opinions of Virginia Woof, Margaret Kennedy, and others” which has recently come to light. A collection of answers to 39-questions, “its yellow and curling title page” announces it as “’Really and Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions,” notes William Mackesy, grandson and literary executor of novelist Kennedy.

It was passed around and filled in by hand by a group of ten writers total, also including Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West, Hilaire Belloc, and Stella Benson, between 1923 and 1927. “Each contribution was sealed up,” Mackesy writes, “presumably to await a distant thriller-opening, which gave safe space for barbs and jokes at contemporaries’ expense.” With their similarities to our own quick-take cultural products, the questionnaires are sure to be a hit on the internet.

These secret literary confessions get prickly, thanks to “waspish” questions like “the most overrated English writer living” and “a deceased writer whose character you most dislike.” Unsurprisingly, Woolf’s answers are some of the sharpest. In answer to the latter question, she wrote “I like all dead men of letters.” As for the living, one unnamed respondent “called T.S. Eliot the worst living English poet as well as the worst living literary critic.”

Rebecca West dismissed the whole thing as “silly… it’s like being asked to select the best sunset.” Nonetheless, in answer to a question about which writer would still be read in 25 years, she simply answered, “me.” Belloc did the same. Kennedy called Woolf the most overrated writer (but greatest living critic), Woolf and West named Belloc most overrated. Joyce appears more than once in that category, as does D.H. Lawrence.

It’s all great fun, but maybe the “bitchy” headline oversells this aspect a little and undersells the less sensational but more informative parts of the exercise. For instance, all of the writers except one (with one write-in for “I don’t know”) cast the same vote for greatest literary genius (spoiler: it’s Shakespeare). They revered James Boswell, Thomas Hardy, Max Beerbohm, Plato, Jane Austen, Homer, Catullus. They ignored many others. “There is no mention anywhere,” Mackesy points out, “of Virgil or Donne, and only one of Chaucer, Dickens, George Eliot and Henry James.”

No matter how forward-looking some of their work turned out to be, they were writers of their time, with typical attitudes, beliefs, and opinions when it came to literature. That said, the casual narcissism and snark some of the questions elicit are timeless qualities. Learn more about the book, including its like origins and mysterious provenance, from Mackesy at the Independent.

via Mental Floss

Flannery O’Connor Renders Her Verdict on Ayn Rand’s Fiction: It’s As “Low As You Can Get”

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Never Did Any Book So Bore Me.” Shen Then Quit at Page 200

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

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

Artificial Intelligence for Everyone: An Introductory Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Coursera

in Artificial Intelligence, Online Courses, Technology | March 19th, 2019

If you follow edtech, you know the name Andrew Ng. He’s the Stanford computer science professor who co-founded MOOC-provider Coursera and later became chief scientist at Baidu. Since leaving Baidu, he’s been working on several artificial intelligence projects, including a series of Deep Learning courses that he unveiled in 2017. And now comes AI for Everyone–an online course that makes artificial intelligence intelligible to a broad audience.

In this largely non-technical course, students will learn:

The meaning behind common AI terminology, including neural networks, machine learning, deep learning, and data science.
What AI realistically can–and cannot–do.
How to spot opportunities to apply AI to problems in your own organization.
What it feels like to build machine learning and data science projects.
How to work with an AI team and build an AI strategy in an organization.
How to navigate ethical and societal discussions surrounding AI.

The four-week course takes about eight hours to complete. You can audit it for free. However if you want to earn a certificate–which you can then share on your LinkedIn profile, printed resumes and CVs–the course will run $49.

AI for Everyone will be added to our list of Free Computer Science courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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The Gnarly Surf Rock of Dick Dale (RIP): Watch the Legend Play “Misirlou,” Surfin’ the Wedge,” and “Pipeline” (with Stevie Ray Vaughan)

in Music | March 19th, 2019

The Endless Summer is over. The archetypal 1966 surf documentary might have been scored by The Sandals, but the sound and the cultural dominance of surf culture would perhaps never come into being, and may not have survived the decade, without Dick Dale, who died on March 18th at the age of 81. His gnarly, menacing guitar on songs like “Miserlou” and “Pipeline” turned a fad dominated by the teen anthems of The Beach Boys and Annette Funicello’s post-Mouseketeers bikini and beehive into genuinely gritty rock and roll.

Dale’s sound defined the risky wanderlust of surfing that early skateboarders picked up on in the 70s and 80s, snowboarders in the 90s, and so on. Hundreds of guitarists stole from his distinctive technique long after the 60s surf rock craze died at the hands of British invaders. Dale rode the sound into the 21st century, touring and performing across a United States whose popular culture he helped invent by appearing on (where else) The Ed Sullivan Show.

But it’s arguable whether his fame would have survived as long without Quentin Tarantino’s shrewd use of “Misirlou” in Pulp Fiction’s opening credits. It so happens that Dale almost didn’t survive past the sixties himself. If he had died from what seemed like a terminal cancer in 1965, it’s possible surf guitar would have died with him, become a curious relic rather than a living tradition.

Jimi Hendrix thought so—at least according to Dale in the liner notes to 1997’s Better Shred Than Dead: The Dick Dale Anthology. “Then you’ll never hear surf music again,” Hendrix supposedly said. Maybe in the purest sense, it’s true. Only Dale truly “transferred,” as he put it, the “tremendous amount of power” of surfing into the guitar. His playing was an extreme sport; his shows were “stomps”; the audience never stopped moving for a minute, whooping and hollering along with him.

And still, his cavernous guitar filled ballrooms. He pushed Fender to build louder and louder amplifiers, and everyone else along with them. Like Hendrix, he was a lefty who played a flipped-over right-handed Fender Strat. Yet Dale didn’t restring the guitar, effectively playing it upside-down. He used the heaviest strings he could find, the loudest amps that could be made, and more reverb than anyone had previously thought advisable. “Bands like the Beach Boys,” writes Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker, “often sang about surfing,” but the genre Dale invented “was wet and gnarly and unconcerned with romance or sweetness.”

His style earned Dale the title of “King of the Surf Guitar,” also the title of his second album and a fact he liked to trumpet as often as he could, along with claims that he was called the “Father of Heavy Metal.” (Link Wray might like a word.) He was a tireless promoter and performer without whose influence there may’ve been no Endless Summer-scoring Sandals or Surfaris’ “Wipe Out”—surf culture essentials that traveled the world.

Surf rock became a niche sound, popular with increasingly specialized audiences, before Quentin Tarantino made it cool again. Pulp Fiction’s use of the song was not an ironic detournement, but a genuine reminder of how dangerous Dale sounded. He buzzsawed through the early-sixties scene of skinny ties and big hair. The footage of him above playing “Misirlou” with The Del Tones—all of whom wear terrified smiles and identical suits, above—is strangely Lynchian.

Part of the incongruity comes from watching square white Americans bounce through a haunting Egyptian folk song, while looking like they should be playing “Mr. Sandman.” Dale made 50s pop seem childish, and sound-tracked the entry of mildly adult situations in 60s surf movies. He deserved to have fared better from his influence and fame.

Dale’s last couple decades were spent like too many other people in the U.S. He couldn’t stop touring, he said, “because I will die. Physically and literally, I will die.” After his first recovery from colorectal cancer in 1965, he continued to battle the disease,” writes The Washington Post. “Up until the end of his life, Dale was explicit that he toured to fund his treatment” after his cancer returned. He couldn’t retire even when his career rebounded, twice after his early sixties’ heyday: first in 1987 when he recorded “Pipeline” (further up) with Stevie Ray Vaughan and again after Pulp Fiction.

His fans continued to support him not because he was a hip nostalgia act, but, he said, because he grew and branched out as a guitar player and he was honest about his difficulties, and people connected. He was an American original. The son of Lebanese immigrants, he took the music of his parents’ home country, blended it with country swing and blues, and played it dirty, wet, and as loud as it could go, something no one had quite done before and thousands have done since.

The Beach Party Film: A Short Appreciation of One of the Oddest Subgenres in Film History

A History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Mythos: An Animation Retells Timeless Greek Myths with Abstract Modern Designs

David Lynch Teaches an Online Course on Film & Creativity

Christopher Hitches Makes the Case for Paying Reparations for Slavery in the United States

Behold the Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, a Fantastical 1917 Mashup of Tales from Homer’s Odyssey, King Arthur, the Brothers Grimm & More

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Civilization–and Recommends Ways to Ensure That It Survives (1978)

Virginia Woolf & Friends Name Their Favorite and Least Favorite Writers in a Newly Unearthed 1923 Survey

Artificial Intelligence for Everyone: An Introductory Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Coursera

The Gnarly Surf Rock of Dick Dale (RIP): Watch the Legend Play “Misirlou,” Surfin’ the Wedge,” and “Pipeline” (with Stevie Ray Vaughan)

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