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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

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 Face­book.

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

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 Face­book.

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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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­cel Proust Fills Out a Ques­tion­naire in 1890: The Man­u­script of the ‘Proust Ques­tion­naire’

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

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings Sal­vador Dalí Back to Life: “Greet­ings, I Am Back”

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Iden­ti­fies the Six Main Arcs in Sto­ry­telling: Wel­come to the Brave New World of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism

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

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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

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

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Take a Journey Inside Vincent Van Gogh’s Paintings with a New Digital Exhibition

in Art, Technology | March 18th, 2019

Vin­cent van Gogh died in 1890, long before the emer­gence of any of the visu­al tech­nolo­gies that impress us here in the 21st cen­tu­ry. But the dis­tinc­tive vision of real­i­ty expressed through paint­ings still cap­ti­vates us, and per­haps cap­ti­vates us more than ever: the lat­est of the many trib­utes we con­tin­ue to pay to van Gogh’s art takes the form Van Gogh, Star­ry Night, a “dig­i­tal exhi­bi­tion” at the Ate­lier des Lumières, a dis­used foundry turned pro­jec­tor- and sound sys­tem-laden mul­ti­me­dia space in Paris. “Pro­ject­ed on all the sur­faces of the Ate­lier,” its site says of the exhi­bi­tion, “this new visu­al and musi­cal pro­duc­tion retraces the intense life of the artist.”

Van Gogh’s inten­si­ty man­i­fest­ed in var­i­ous ways, includ­ing more than 2,000 paint­ings paint­ed in the last decade of his life alone. Van Gogh, Star­ry Night sur­rounds its vis­i­tors with the painter’s work, “which rad­i­cal­ly evolved over the years, from The Pota­to Eaters (1885), Sun­flow­ers (1888) and Star­ry Night (1889) to Bed­room at Arles (1889), from his sun­ny land­scapes and nightscapes to his por­traits and still lives.”

It also takes them through the jour­ney of his life itself, includ­ing his “sojourns in Neunen, Arles, Paris, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and Auvers-sur-Oise.” It will also take them to Japan, a land van Gogh dreamed of and that inspired him to cre­ate “the art of the future,” with a sup­ple­men­tal show titled Dreamed Japan: Images of the Float­ing World.

Both Van Gogh, Star­ry Night and Dreamed Japan run until the end of this year. If you hap­pen to have a chance to make it out to the Ate­lier des Lumières, first con­sid­er down­load­ing the exhi­bi­tion’s smart­phone and tablet appli­ca­tion that pro­vides record­ed com­men­tary on van Gogh’s mas­ter­pieces. That counts as one more lay­er of this elab­o­rate audio­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence that, despite employ­ing the height of mod­ern muse­um tech­nol­o­gy, nev­er­the­less draws all its aes­thet­ic inspi­ra­tion from 19th-cen­tu­ry paint­ings — and will send those who expe­ri­ence it back to those 19th-cen­tu­ry paint­ings with a height­ened appre­ci­a­tion. Near­ly 130 years after Van Gogh’s death, we’re still using all the inge­nu­ity we can muster to see the world as he did.

via MyMod­ern­met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

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

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

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

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 Face­book.

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