Late this summer, the Talking Heads released a remastered version of their concert film, Stop Making Sense. Although the film has already left some theaters, the band hasn’t stopped promoting it. Above, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth join Stephen Colbert and reminisce about their adventures at RISD, CBGBs, and touring with The Ramones. It’s great seeing the band sharing a stage (and a laugh) again, even if there are no instruments in sight. Find Part 1 above, and parts 2 and 3 below…
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When François Rabelais came up with a couple of giants to put at the center of a series of inventive and ribald works of satirical fiction, he named one of them Gargantua. That may not sound particularly clever today, gargantuan being a fairly common adjective to describe anything quite large. But we actually owe the word itself to Rabelais, or more specifically, to the nearly half-millennium-long legacy of the character into whom he breathed life. But there’s so much more to Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel, or The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose enduring status as a masterpiece of the grotesque owes much to its author’s wit, linguistic virtuosity, and sheer brazenness.
Nor has it hurt that the books have inspired vivid illustrations from a host of artists, one of whom in particular stands out: Gustave Doré, whom Richard Smyth calls “one of the most prolific — and most successful — book illustrators of the nineteenth century.”
Here at Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the art he created to accompany the work of Dante, Cervantes, and Poe, each a writer possessed of a highly distinctive set of literary powers, and each of whom thus received a different but equally lavish and evocative treatment from Doré.
For Rabelais, says the site of book dealer Heribert Tenschert, the 22-year-old artist produced (in 1854) “100 images that oscillate between the whimsical and the uncanny, between realism and fantasy,” a count he would expand to 700 in another edition two decades later.
You can see a great many of Doré’s illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruelat Wikimedia Commons. The simultaneous extravagance and repugnance of the series’ medieval France may seem impossibly distant to us, but it can hardly have felt like yesterday to Doré either, given that he was working three centuries after Rabelais.
As suggested by Heribert Tenschert, perhaps these imaginative visions of the Middle Ages — like Balzac’s Rabelaisian Les contes drolatiques, which he also illustrated — “resonated with Doré because they reminded him of the mysterious atmosphere of his childhood, which he had spent in the middle of the medieval city of Strasbourg.” Whatever his connection, Doré created images that still bring to mind a whole range of descriptors: somberly jocular, rigorously voluptuous, compellingly repellent, and above all pantagruelist. (Look it up.)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
It has undergone several name changes over the course of its 145 years, and played host to drama, opera, ballet, films, oratorio, pantomime, variety shows, and world-famous popular musicians like David Bowie, REM, Foo Fighters… and Dublin native Sinéad O’Connor, who arrived at the venue in 2011, unceremoniously toting her aluminum foil-wrapped lunch.
Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Róisín Waters, sang back up.
Reviewer Nicola Byrne wrote in Golden Plec that “a single spotlight illuminated O’Connor on the middle of the stage, as she launched into “I Am Stretched On Your Grave,” a song she ‘Usually dedicates to any dead people that may be present:’”
With no instrumental, all attention was on that spotlight. If a pin had’ve been dropped in the Olympia, I would’ve known about it.
It was a meaningful way for fans to connect to an artist who spoke to them.
Choir! Choir! Choir! previously paid tribute to David Bowie with “Space Oddity,” and Prince (composer of “Nothing Compares 2 You)” with “When Doves Cry” not long after their deaths.
Prior to Dublin, Choir! Choir! Choir! honored O’Connor with a singalong of “Nothing Compares 2 You” at the Toronto Opera House, in the town where their movement got its start.
Ticket purchases benefited CAMH: The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Adilman and Goldman were joined onstage by the producer of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Chris Birkett, and Toronto-based singer-songwriter Feist, whose first album purchase was O’Connor’s debut, The Lion and the Cobra.
“I remember so clearly the first time I heard her at a friend’s house after school,” she told Index Magazine in 2005:
She blew my mind. Her voice sounded like it was from another universe. She redefined everything for me.
Turning the clock back to 2016, we find Choir! Choir! Choir! participants tackling “Nothing Compares 2” as a way of getting the jump on February’s most fraught holiday:
Valentine’s Day kinda sucks so last night, in anticipation, we celebrated EPIC HEARTBREAKS with the one and only Sinéad O’Connor. Props to Prince (yes, we know he wrote this amazing tune!) for not taking this video down in 7 hours and 15 days.
The non-profit digital library Internet Archive is rich in interesting material, but its lack of curation can often leave the user feeling like they’re sorting through the world’s most disorganized junk shop, rooting for hidden treasure.
Marier was also discouraged by “a combination of confusing boolean operators and an absolute hodgepodge of different metadata tags and category names:
I figured that if I was having these problems, then there were likely other folks who were as well. So I decided to put my design skills to good use and work on a solution. The biggest issues that I felt needed to be solved were the user experience, and the content curation. For the archive’s curation, I opted to curate each item manually. While I could have likely figured out a way to curate these items using an automated script, I feel that there is an inherent value to human curation. When a collection is curated by a computer it can seem confusing and arbitrary. Whereas with human curation there is often a deliberate connection between each object in the collection. For the navigation I wanted to ensure that it was simple enough that anyone could understand it and operate it. So instead of having a ton of complex operators, I instead decided to organize them by their aspect in design.
Graphic design nerds, rejoice!
Marier determines which of the finds should make the cut by considering relevance and image quality.
A quick peek suggests graphic designers are not the only ones who stand to benefit from this labor of love.
Educators, historians, and activists will be rewarded with a supplement to the Guardian from February 1970, which provided an overview of the Black Panther Party in their own words. There’s a ton of information and history packed into these 8 pages, from its formation and its 10-point program, to an interview with then-incarcerated party chairman Bobby Seale.
The IBM Ergonomics Handbook from 1989 addresses an evergreen topic. Office managers, physical therapists, and digital nomads should take note. Its recommendations on configuring the work space for maximum efficiency, productivity and employee comfort are solid. It’s not this handsome little yellow and blue employee manual’s fault that references to now-obsolete technology render it a bit quaint:
Think of two fairly recent innovations in our lives — the push button telephone and the pocket calculator. Both have a standard key set layout, but not the same layout.
Marier elected to let each pick be represented by its covers, figuring “what better way to browse designed objects than by how they look.”
We agree, though we’re worried about where this might leave 1924’s Posters & Their Designers. How can its staid blue cover compete against its sexy neighbors in the posters category?
Small business owners, set dressers and public domain fans should give Posters & Their Designers a chance. Behind that discreet blue cover are a wide assortment of stunning early 20th century posters, including some full color reproductions.
While not specifically typography related, Marier wisely gives this resource a typography tag. Hand lettering loyalists and font fanatics will find much to admire.
About a decade and a half ago, The Lost City of Z seemed to have been placed front-and-center in most bookstores of the English-speaking world. It was the first book by journalist David Grann, and it handily proved that he knew how to deal with history in a way that could capture the public imagination. (His second, Killers of the Flower Moon, provided the basis for the acclaimed Martin Scorsese film now in theaters.) Subtitled A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, the book tells of British explorer Captain Percy Fawcett, who went missing with his son in that vast jungle back in 1925. They’d been looking for the “lost city” of the title, of whose existence Fawcett had been convinced by what may now strike us as rather scant evidence.
“The idea was based on rumors that had circulated for centuries that there were once large cities, filled with people, deep in the Amazon,” says the narrator of the Vox Atlas video above, fired by the discovery of grand capitals like Tenochtitlan in modern-day Mexico and Cusco in Peru. Experts, for their part, “believed that this rainforest was simply too hostile and too remote to ever have supported cities.”
More recently, scientists started identifying man-made ditches and mounds all over the Amazon, which complicated the picture considerably. Instead of the extravagant metropolis intimated by explorers in the centuries before him, Fawcett only encountered small groups of natives living in simple villages. The consensus came to hold that a host of environmental, geological, and biological factors conspired against the growth of large-scale civilizations in the rainforest.
But “it turns out, Fawcett was looking in the right place, just for the wrong thing.” He never took note of patches of intentionally cultivated fertile soil, ditches where once stood walls leading to a plaza, and “delineated areas for gardens and orchards.” Though none of this quite suggested the fabled El Dorado, “over the past few decades, experts have uncovered evidence of large settlements all over the Amazon,” a single one of which could have had up to 60,000 inhabitants. By the time Fawcett arrived in the early twentieth century, most of those locals had long since died of European-imported diseases, leaving their wood- and-Earth structures to decompose. Given how far transport and construction technologies have come since then, perhaps it’s time to try out a different obsession: not over finding old Amazonian cities, but building new ones.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
No instrument is more closely identified with rock and roll music than the electric guitar, and no form of performance is more closely associated with the electric guitar than the solo. You can hardly discuss any of those three without discussing the others. Hence the broad sweep of Axe to Grind, the new seven-part video series from Youtube music channel Polyphonic on the electric guitar solo, a cultural phenomenon that can’t be explained without telling the story of a vast swath of popular music through practically the entire twentieth century and continuing on into the twenty-first.
Like any proper full-scope rock history, this one begins with the blues, tracing the stylistic developments that emerged among guitarists on the Mississippi Delta with the advent of new technologies like electricity.
Axe to Grind’s first episode covers such early electric guitar players as Charlie Christian (previously featured here on Open Culture), Fay “Smitty” Smith, Muddy Waters, and Junior Bernard, who was “one of the first to realize that if you cranked vacuum-tube amplifiers up to maximum volume and played as loud as you could through them, the vacuum tubes would compress the signal so they didn’t explode. The result was a new sort of gritty tone that came to be known as overdrive.”
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The second episode covers the nineteen-fifties and the rise of rock and roll itself, a broad musical church that came to encompass musicians from Chuck Berry, Junior Walker, and B. B. King to Johnny Watson, Link Wray (who recorded the only instrumental song ever banned from the radio), and Buddy Holly. Then comes the nineteen-sixties, the power of whose transatlantic pop-cultural explosion still comes through loud and clear in the electric guitar solos on the records by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Byrds, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and many other acts besides. The fourth episode, still to come on Youtube, is already available on the subscription streaming platform Nebula. However you watch Axe to Grind, rest assured that it will leave you not just with a deeper understanding of the electric guitar solo’s evolution, but a much deeper appreciation of the “Johnny B. Goode” scene from Back to the Future.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
A staple of Andean diets for thousands of years, quinoa (KEEN-wah) has been touted as a superfood recently for its high protein content and potential to solve hunger crises. It’s represented by the usual celebrities: Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston … and David Lynch. Oh yes, have you not tried David Lynch’s quinoa recipe? Well, you must. If you’ve remained unswayed by the glitterati, perhaps this very Lynchian of pitches will turn you on to the grain. Watch the first part of Lynch’s video recipe above, part two below. It opens at peak Lynch: pulsing ominous music, garish lighting, and the obsessive kind of patience for the slow build that may be David Lynch’s alone.
By Part Two of Lynch’s video recipe, we are fully immersed in a place seemingly far away from quinoa, a place of the portentous topography of David Lynch’s inner life. Everyday objects take on a mysterious glowing resonance. Small ritualistic exchanges stand in for global shifts of consciousness.
So in a way, maybe we’re still close to the magic of quinoa. Lynch made the short video as an extra for the 2006 Inland Empire DVD. As Dangerous Minds points out, its current YouTube iteration “looks like crap” and “there’s at least a couple of minutes missing… it’s still worth a look.”
If you don’t have David Lynch’s patience but do have his taste for quinoa, read the full recipe below. It’s likewise full of delightful asides and digressions.
Yield: 1 bowl
Cooking Time: 17 minutes
Ingredients: 1/2 cup quinoa
1 1/2 cups organic broccoli (chilled, from bag)
1 cube vegetable bullion
Braggs Liquid Aminos
Extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Preparation:
* Fill medium saucepan with about an inch of fresh water.
* Set pan on stove, light a nice hot flame add several dashes of sea salt.
* Look at the quinoa. It’s like sand, this quinoa. It’s real real tight little grains, but it’s going to puff up.
* Unwrap bullion cube, bust it up with a small knife, and let it wait there. It’ll be happy waiting right there.
* When water comes to a boil, add quinoa and cover pan with lid. Reduce heat and simmer for 8 minutes.
* Meanwhile, retrieve broccoli from refrigerator and set aside, then fill a fine crystal wine glass—one given to you by Agnes and Maya from Lódz, Poland—with red wine, ‘cause this is what you do when you’re making quinoa. Go outside, sit, take a smoke and think about all the little quinoas bubbling away in the pan.
* Add broccoli, cover and let cook for an additional 7 minutes.
* Meanwhile, go back outside and tell the story about the train with the coal-burning engine that stopped in a barren, dust-filled landscape on a moonless Yugoslavian night in 1965. The story about the frog moths and the small copper coin that became one room-temperature bottle of violet sugar water, six ice-cold Coca-colas, and handfuls and handfuls of silver coins.
* Turn off heat, add bullion to quinoa and stir with the tip of the small knife you used to bust up the bullion.
* Scoop quinoa into bowl using a spoon. Drizzle with liquid amino acids and olive oil. Serve and enjoy.
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In 1939, Margaret Hamilton made cinema history as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. In 1976, she made television history by reprising the role on a Sesame Street episode that was pulled from the show’s rotation immediately after it aired. It seems to have drawn Sesame Workshop, then known as the Children’s Television Workshop, a fair few complaints from the parents of disturbed children. As a result, writes Mental Floss’ Michele Debczak, “the episode was banned for being ‘too scary’ for kids, and for decades it was difficult to find,” seen only on low-quality video tapes and in the troubled minds of certain Generation Xers.
Now Hamilton’s Sesame Street appearance has become available on Youtube, ready for you to watch with the braver children in your life this Halloween. But then, it’s hard to imagine any twenty-first-century viewer being truly frightened by it, no matter how young. (This in contrast to the Wicked Witch’s army of flying monkeys in the original film, which continues to give kids the creeps generation after generation.)
Some may even be delighted by the evident relish with which Hamilton plays her part, even 37 years after the first time; as William Hughes writes at The AV Club, she “was always game to reprise the role of the Witch on behalf of educational programming; she also appeared, around that same period, on several episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
In Big Bird’s neighborhood, the Wicked Witch accidentally loses her broom to David, whom readers of a certain age may remember as the spirited law student who once dated the iconic Maria Rodriguez. Only when the Witch shows him some respect, David insists, will he return that precious possession. Thus begins the Witch’s campaign of terror and trickery on Sesame Street, which continues until David finds a way to outsmart her into a wholly uncharacteristic show of courtesy. This story within the episode deals with the timeless theme of overcoming fears; and as the long unavailability of the episode itself shows us, giving in to fears — especially those of public backlash — can have real consequences.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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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