An AI-Generated Painting Won First Prize at a State Fair & Sparked a Debate About the Essence of Art

in Art, Technology | September 7th, 2022

Théâtre D’opéra Spa­tial by Jason Allen Jason Allen via Dis­cord

The tech­nol­o­gy behind arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-aid­ed art has long been in devel­op­ment, but the era of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-aid­ed art feels like a sud­den arrival. Since the recent release of DALL‑E and oth­er image-gen­er­a­tion tools, our social-media feeds have filled up with elab­o­rate art­works and even pho­to­re­al­is­tic-look­ing pic­tures cre­at­ed entire­ly through the algo­rith­mic pro­cess­ing of a sim­ple ver­bal descrip­tion. We now live in a time, that is to say, where we type in a few words and get back an image nobody has ever before imag­ined, let alone seen. And if we do it right, that image could win a blue rib­bon at the state fair.

“This year, the Col­orado State Fair’s annu­al art com­pe­ti­tion gave out prizes in all the usu­al cat­e­gories: paint­ing, quilt­ing, sculp­ture,” reports the New York Times’ Kevin Roose. “But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He cre­at­ed it with Mid­jour­ney, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence pro­gram that turns lines of text into hyper-real­is­tic graph­ics.” The work, Théâtre D’opéra Spa­tial, “took home the blue rib­bon in the fair’s con­test for emerg­ing dig­i­tal artists,” and it does look, at first glance, like an impres­sion­is­tic and ambi­ence-rich past-future vision that could grace the cov­er of one of the bet­ter class of sci­ence-fic­tion or fan­ta­sy nov­els.

Reac­tions have, of course, var­ied. Roose finds at least one Twit­ter user insist­ing that “we’re watch­ing the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes,” and an actu­al work­ing artist claim­ing that “this thing wants our jobs.” Allen him­self pro­vides a help­ful­ly brash clos­ing quote: “This isn’t going to stop. Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” Over on Metafil­ter, one com­menter makes the expect­ed ref­er­ence: “It has a sort of Duchamp-sub­mit­ting-Foun­tain vibe, only in reverse. Instead of the propo­si­tion being that the jury would wrong­ly fail to rec­og­nize some­thing triv­ial and as art, now we have the propo­si­tion that the jury would wrong­ly fail to rec­og­nize that the art is some­thing triv­ial.”

How­ev­er lit­tle desire you may have to hang Théâtre D’opéra Spa­tial on your own wall, a momen­t’s thought will sure­ly lead you to sus­pect that, on anoth­er lev­el, the con­di­tions that brought about its vic­to­ry are any­thing but triv­ial. Mid­jour­ney, as the orig­i­nal poster on Metafil­ter explains, “can be run on any com­put­er with a decent GPU, a Google col­lab, or run through their own servers.” The abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate more-or-less con­vinc­ing works of art (often lit­tered, it must be said, with the bizarre visu­al glitch­es that have been the tech­nol­o­gy’s sig­na­ture so far) out of just a few key­strokes will only become more pow­er­ful and more wide­spread. And so the “real” artists must find a new form too vital for the machines to mas­ter — just as they’ve had to do all through­out moder­ni­ty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er DALL‑E, the Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Artist That Lets You Cre­ate Sur­re­al Art­work

The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Recon­struct­ed with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

What Hap­pens When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ates Images to Match the Lyrics of Icon­ic Songs: David Bowie’s “Star­man,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stair­way to Heav­en”, ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” & More

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Listen to Music Playlists to Help You Study Like Nietzsche, Socrates, Kant & Other Great Thinkers

in Music, Philosophy | September 7th, 2022

The great thinkers of the past knew noth­ing of Youtube — which, we might be tempt­ed to say today, enabled them to become great thinkers in the first place. This is, of course, unchar­i­ta­ble: sure­ly the rise of stream­ing media counts among the most impor­tant devel­op­ments in the his­to­ry of edu­ca­tion. Many col­lege stu­dents today may gen­uine­ly won­der how pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions got by with­out Youtube’s back­ground-music mix­es engi­neered, as the New York­er’s Aman­da Petru­sich wrote not long ago, “to facil­i­tate and sus­tain a mood, which in turn might enable a task: study­ing, fold­ing laun­dry, mak­ing spread­sheets, idly brows­ing the Inter­net.”

If Youtube had been avail­able to impor­tant minds of pre­vi­ous cen­turies — indeed, pre­vi­ous mil­len­nia — what sort of study­ing music would it have served to them? This is, in some sense, a philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion, and a phi­los­o­phy chan­nel has been pro­vid­ing answes: a host of answers, in fact, each in the form of a themed Youtube mix.

On Filosofia Acadêmi­ca you’ll find a playlist to study like “a sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher” (Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Tar­ti­ni), like “a medieval philoso­pher hav­ing the truth revealed by divine grace” (Gre­go­ri­an chants), and like “Socrates after dis­cov­er­ing from the Ora­cle of Del­phi that he is the wis­est” (lots of harp and boat sounds).

Uploaded over the past year, these playlists have proven to be the biggest hits on Filosofia Acadêmi­ca (a Brazil­ian chan­nel also offer­ing inter­views like “Filosofia da Matemáti­ca com Oswal­do Chateaubriand” and “Filosofia da Religião com Domin­gos Faria,”). Its cre­ator Elan Mar­in­ho has also put effort into craft­ing music mix­es after par­tic­u­lar thinkers in such notable moments as “New­ton stick­ing nee­dles in his eyes to test hypothe­ses about light,” “Tur­ing invent­ing the com­put­er” and “Niet­zsche over the abyss in a tightrope between the ani­mal and the über­men­sch” (open­ing, nat­u­ral­ly, with “Ride of the Valkyries”). Many of these selec­tions dis­pense with peri­od accu­ra­cy, depart­ing wild­ly from the sub­jec­t’s time and place. But then, has­n’t imag­i­na­tive license has always been a key com­po­nent of great thought?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stream 58 Hours of Free Clas­si­cal Music Select­ed to Help You Study, Work, or Sim­ply Relax

Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Clas­si­cal Piano Com­po­si­tions: They’re Apho­ris­tic Like His Phi­los­o­phy

Hear a 19-Hour Playlist of Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Favorite Music: Schu­bert, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and… Yvette Guil­bert

An Ancient Philo­soph­i­cal Song Recon­struct­ed and Played for the First Time in 1,000 Years

Hear What It Sounds Like When Philoso­pher Daniel Dennett’s Brain Activ­i­ty Gets Turned into Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Making of Modern Ukraine: A Free Online Course from Yale Professor Timothy Snyder

in History | September 6th, 2022

This fall, his­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der is teach­ing a course at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty called The Mak­ing of Mod­ern Ukraine. And he’s gen­er­ous­ly mak­ing the lec­tures avail­able on YouTube–so that you can fol­low along too. All of the cur­rent­ly-avail­able lec­tures appear above (or on this playlist), and we will keep adding new ones as they come online. A syl­labus for the course can be found here. Key ques­tions cov­ered by the course include:

What brought about the Ukrain­ian nation?  Ukraine must have exist­ed as a soci­ety and poli­ty on 23 Feb­ru­ary 2022, else Ukraini­ans would not have col­lec­tive­ly resist­ed Russ­ian inva­sion the next day.  Why has the exis­tence of Ukraine occa­sioned such con­tro­ver­sy?  In what ways are Pol­ish, Russ­ian, and Jew­ish self-under­stand­ing depen­dent upon expe­ri­ences in Ukraine?  Just how and when did a mod­ern Ukrain­ian nation emerge?  Just how for that mat­ter does any mod­ern nation emerge?  And why some nations and not oth­ers?  What is the bal­ance between struc­ture and agency in his­to­ry?  Can nations be cho­sen, and does it mat­ter?  Can the choic­es of indi­vid­u­als influ­ence the rise of much larg­er social orga­ni­za­tions?  If so, how?  Ukraine was the coun­try most touched by Sovi­et and Nazi ter­ror: what can we learn about those sys­tems, then, from Ukraine?  Is the post-colo­nial, mul­ti­lin­gual Ukrain­ian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?

The Mak­ing of Mod­ern Ukraine will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta 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

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

A Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion of On Tyran­ny: Twen­ty Lessons from the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, the Best­selling Book by His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

Sav­ing Ukrain­ian Cul­tur­al Her­itage Online: 1,000+ Librar­i­ans Dig­i­tal­ly Pre­serve Arti­facts of Ukrain­ian Civ­i­liza­tion Before Rus­sia Can Destroy Them

Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Min­utes

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Two Women in Their 90s Recall Their Teenage Years in Victorian 1890s London

in Fashion, Film, History, Video - Politics/Society | September 6th, 2022


Mud everywhere…and where there wasn’t mud, there was fog, and in between was us, enjoy­ing our­selves. — Berta Ruck

Berta Ruck and Frances ‘Effy’ Jones were teenagers in the 1890s, and while their rec­ol­lec­tions of their for­ma­tive years in mud­dy old Lon­don are hard­ly a por­trait of Jazz Age wild­ness, nei­ther are they in keep­ing with mod­ern notions of stuffy Vic­to­ri­an mores.

Inter­viewed for the BBC doc­u­men­tary series Yesterday’s Wit­ness in 1970, these nona­ge­nar­i­ans are for­mi­da­ble per­son­ages, sharp­er than prover­bial tacks, and unlike­ly to elic­it the sort of agist pity embod­ied in the lyrics of a pop­u­lar dit­ty Ruck remem­bers the Cock­neys singing in the gut­ter after the pubs had closed for the night.

“Do you think I might dare to sing [it] now?” Ruck, then 91, asks (rhetor­i­cal­ly):

She may have known bet­ter days

When she was in her prime

She may have known bet­ter days

Once upon a time…

(Raise your hand if you sus­pect those lyrics are describ­ing a washed up spin­ster in her late 20s or ear­ly 30s.)

The 94-year-old Jones reach­es back more than 7 decades to tell about her first job, when she was paid 8 shillings a week to sit in a store­front win­dow, demon­strat­ing a new machine known as a type­writer.

Some of her earn­ings went toward the pur­chase a bicy­cle, which she rode back and forth to work and overnight hol­i­days in Brighton, scan­dalous­ly clad in bloomers, or as Jones and her friends referred to them, “ratio­nal dress”.

Ruck, pegged by her head­mistress as an “indo­lent and feck­less girl”, went on to study at the Slade School of Art, before achiev­ing promi­nence as a best­selling romance nov­el­ist, whose 90 some titles include His Offi­cial Fiancée, Miss Million’s Maid and In Anoth­er Girl’s Shoes.

We do hope at least one of these fea­tures a hero­ine resent­ful­ly brush­ing a skirt mud­died up to the knees by pass­ing han­som cabs, an impo­si­tion Ruck refus­es to sweet­en with the nos­tal­gia.

As the British Film Institute’s Patrick Rus­sell writes in 100 British Doc­u­men­taries, the Yesterday’s Wit­ness series, and Jones and Ruck’s episode, in par­tic­u­lar, pop­u­lar­ized the oral his­to­ry approach to doc­u­men­tary, in which the direc­tor-inter­view­er is an invis­i­ble pres­ence, cre­at­ing the impres­sion that the sub­ject is speak­ing direct­ly to the audi­ence, unprompt­ed:

The series’ mak­ers suc­cess­ful­ly resist­ed any temp­ta­tions to patron­ize or edi­to­ri­al­ize, and aimed at sym­pa­thet­ic curios­i­ty rather than nos­tal­gia. The two women tell their sto­ries flu­ent­ly, humor­ous­ly, intel­li­gent­ly — offer­ing con­sid­ered ret­ro­spec­tive com­ment on their generation’s assump­tions, nei­ther sim­ply accept­ing nor reject­ing them…Unlike text­books, and oth­er types of doc­u­men­tary, films like Two Vic­to­ri­an Girls gave the youth access to the mod­ern past as pri­vate­ly expe­ri­enced. 

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Improbable Invention of Chinese Typewriters & Computer Keyboards: Three Videos Tell the Techno-Cultural Story

in History, Technology | September 6th, 2022

Even if you don’t speak a word of Chi­nese, you sure­ly know that the lan­guage uses not an alpha­bet, but ideo­graph­ic char­ac­ters: about 50,000 of them, all told, 3,000 to 5,000 of which must be mem­o­rized in order to achieve rea­son­able lit­er­a­cy. The poten­tial for con­flict between the Chi­nese writ­ing sys­tem and twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy hard­ly needs expla­na­tion. How, in short, do Chi­nese peo­ple type? Youtu­ber John­ny Har­ris offers an expla­na­tion in the video above, begin­ning with the per­haps coun­ter­in­tu­itive answer that Chi­nese peo­ple type with more or less the same key­board every­one else does — when they’re using a com­put­er, at any rate.

Our smart­phone age has giv­en rise to a num­ber of dif­fer­ent input sys­tems, all designed to per­form the same basic task of adapt­ing the ancient and elab­o­rate writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage to dig­i­tal moder­ni­ty. In Har­ris’ telling, these tech­nolo­gies turn on two major devel­op­ments: the cre­ation of pinyin, a ver­sion of the Latin alpha­bet that pho­net­i­cal­ly rep­re­sents Chi­nese char­ac­ters, and the devel­op­ment of algo­rithms that pre­dict which char­ac­ter the user wants to type next.

His expla­na­tion is breezy and not with­out its errors (the dia­gram about thir­teen min­utes in, for exam­ple, actu­al­ly shows the Kore­an alpha­bet), and you might con­sid­er sup­ple­ment­ing it with videos like expa­tri­ate Matthew Tye’s more detailed “How Do Chi­nese Peo­ple Type?” above.

But if you tru­ly want to under­stand the evo­lu­tion of Chi­nese typ­ing, you must begin with the Chi­nese type­writer — and so must read Tom Mul­laney. A Pro­fes­sor of East Asian Lan­guage and Cul­tures at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, Mul­laney pub­lished The Chi­nese Type­writer: A His­to­ry five years ago, and has more recent­ly been at work on a fol­low-up on the Chi­nese com­put­er. In the lec­ture above, he recounts the Chi­nese type­writer’s once-impos­si­ble-seem­ing devel­op­ment in an hour and a half, con­nect­ing it to a host of cul­tur­al, lin­guis­tic, ortho­graph­ic, and tech­no­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na along the way. It’s a sto­ry of inge­nu­ity, but also of sur­vival. Chi­nese made it through the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry with­out being man­gled or abol­ished to meet the lim­i­ta­tions of West­ern engi­neer­ing, but not every writ­ing sys­tem was quite so lucky.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

Behold the 1940s Type­writer That Could Type in Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Japan­ese: Watch More Than a Thou­sand Dif­fer­ent Char­ac­ters in Action

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Writ­ing: From Ancient Egypt to Mod­ern Writ­ing Sys­tems

When IBM Cre­at­ed a Type­writer to Record Dance Move­ments (1973)

Dis­cov­er the Inge­nious Type­writer That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion: The Keaton Music Type­writer Patent­ed in 1936

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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All of the Different Kinds of Acoustic Guitars, and the Different Woods They’re Made Of: The Ultimate Acoustic Guitar Guide

in Music | September 5th, 2022

If you’re just start­ing out on acoustic gui­tar, buy­ing your first instru­ment might seem sim­ple enough…. Head to your local music shop (or ecom­merce retail­er), thrust out your hand, and say some­thing like, “Give me a begin­ner gui­tar now!” Pay your mon­ey, take your lessons, Bob’s your uncle, right?

Ah, but say you encounter one of those things known as a gui­tar sales­per­son? And say that per­son has some ques­tions… “Ok, we’ve got tra­di­tion­al-style dread­noughts with cut­aways or no cut­aways. We’ve got con­cert sized gui­tars, par­lor gui­tars, clas­si­cal, all sorts!” And you, for­mer­ly con­fi­dent shop­per, now find your­self at sea. What’s the dif­fer­ence?

They’re already on to talk­ing about dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als used in mak­ing gui­tars and you check out. You imag­ine a pur­suit where you know what you’re doing: I could learn har­mon­i­ca…. How many kinds of those are there?

Fear not, begin­ner, YouTube gui­tar edu­ca­tor Paul Davids is here to teach us the types of acoustic gui­tars we’re like­ly to encounter in the wild, as well as the dif­fer­ent kinds of “tone woods” and why they make a dif­fer­ence.

Tone wood sim­ply means the kinds of trees used to make the gui­tar – maple, mahogany, rose­wood, spruce, etc. – and it’s called “tone wood” instead of just “wood” for a rea­son. Among mak­ers and play­ers of elec­tric gui­tars, a nev­er-end­ing argu­ment per­sists about how much tone wood mat­ters. There should be lit­tle debate when it comes to acoustic gui­tars.

The sound of an acoustic gui­tar comes from the pick, or the fin­gers, and from the neck, where the strings’ con­tact with the fret­board trav­els down to the res­onat­ing cham­ber of the body and gets sent out into the world. At each of these con­tact points, the prop­er­ties of the wood in ques­tion nat­u­ral­ly con­di­tion the shape of the sound waves.

Enlist­ing the help of East­wood Gui­tars Pepi­jn ‘t Hart above, who donat­ed the gui­tars in the first video for demon­stra­tion pur­pos­es, Davids demon­strates beyond ques­tion that dif­fer­ent woods used to con­struct the back, sides, and top of an acoustic gui­tar have a tremen­dous effect on the tone.

From brighter to dark­er, tre­bli­er to bassier, or what­ev­er you want to call the range of tones, you’ll hear them in these exam­ples of dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als used to make the same sized gui­tars. Why is this impor­tant? As Hart explains, an acoustic gui­tar is basi­cal­ly its own ampli­fi­er. While you can adjust the tone some­what with tech­nique, the first thing you need to do as an acoustic gui­tar play­er is deter­mine the best type of instru­ment you’ll need for the kind of music you’re play­ing.

Gui­tarists may also need to con­sid­er (even­tu­al­ly), the kinds of musi­cians they’re play­ing with. A heavy rock ensem­ble with rum­bling bass and drums will require a much brighter gui­tar to cut through the mix, where­as accom­pa­ny­ing a ban­jo play­er or vio­lin­ist will call for more low end.

You can still grab the first begin­ner acoustic gui­tar you find online and call it a day. But if you’re seri­ous about learn­ing the instru­ment – and learn­ing to play in a musi­cal tra­di­tion, be it folk, blues, coun­try, clas­si­cal, rock, or what­ev­er – you’ll need this essen­tial infor­ma­tion. Davids and Hart make it fun and easy to acquire in the two-part edu­ca­tion­al series above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Build a Cus­tom Hand­craft­ed Acoustic Gui­tar from Start to Fin­ish: The Process Revealed in a Fas­ci­nat­ing Doc­u­men­tary

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

What Does a $275,000 Clas­si­cal Gui­tar Sound Like?

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

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Winnie the Pooh Went Into the Public Domain, and Someone Already Turned the Story Into a Slasher Film: Watch the Trailer for Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey

in Books, Creativity, Film, Video - Arts & Culture | September 2nd, 2022

Deep in the Hun­dred Acre Wood

Where Christo­pher Robin plays

You’ll find the enchant­ed neigh­bor­hood

Of Christo­pher’s child­hood days…

Those sweet­ly sen­ti­men­tal lyrics were penned not by A.A. Milne, cre­ator of Win­nie-The-Pooh but rather the Acad­e­my-Award win­ning song­writ­ing team of broth­ers Robert and Richard Sher­man, who also penned the scores of Mary Pop­pins, Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang, and The Jun­gle Book.

If you are under the age of 60, chances are your con­cept of Pooh, Eey­ore, Piglet, Kan­ga, Roo, Owl, Rab­bit and Tig­ger is informed by Win­nie the Pooh and Hon­ey Tree, the 1966 Dis­ney car­toon that launched a suc­cess­ful fran­chise, not E.H. Shepherd’s charm­ing illus­tra­tions for the 1926 book, Win­nie the Pooh, which entered the pub­lic domain this year.

This means that Milne’s work can be freely repro­duced or reworked, though Dis­ney retains the copy­right to their ani­mat­ed char­ac­ter designs.

Jen­nifer Jenk­ins, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, told the Wash­ing­ton Post that the bulk of the inquiries she field­ed in the lead up to 2022’s pub­lic domain titles becom­ing avail­able had to do with Win­nie the Pooh:

I can’t get over how peo­ple are freak­ing out about Win­nie-the-Pooh in a good way. Every­one has a very spe­cif­ic sto­ry of the first time they read it or their par­ents gave them a doll or they [have] sto­ries about their kids…It’s the Ted Las­so effect.We need a win­dow into a world where peo­ple or ani­mals behave with decen­cy to one anoth­er.”

Ummm…

Judg­ing by the trail­er for their upcom­ing live action, low bud­get fea­ture, Win­nie the Pooh: Blood and Hon­ey, Jagged Edge, a Lon­don-based hor­ror pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, is not much inter­est­ed in Ted Las­so good vibes, though they do man­age to stay with­in the lim­its of the law, equip­ping a black clad Piglet with threat­en­ing tusks, and dress­ing the tit­u­lar “sil­ly old bear” in a red shirt that doesn’t exact­ly scream Tum­my Song.

More like Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre.

Pro­duc­er-Direc­tor Rhys Frake-Water­field whose as-yet-unre­leased cred­its include Peter Pan’s Nev­er­land Night­mare and Spi­ders on a Plane told Vari­ety that “we did as much as we could to make sure [the film] was only based on the 1926 ver­sion:”

When you see the cov­er for this and you see the trail­ers and the stills and all that, there’s no way any­one is going to think this is a child’s ver­sion of it.

Here’s hop­ing he’s right.

The trail­er traf­fics freely in slash­er flick tropes:

A biki­ni clad young woman relax­ing, obliv­i­ous­ly, in a hot tub.

A hand held cam­era track­ing a des­per­ate, and prob­a­bly doomed, escape attempt through the woods.

Unnerv­ing warn­ings writ­ten in blood (or pos­si­bly hon­ey?)

The child­ish scrawl on the sign demar­cat­ing the 100 Acre Wood is both faith­ful to the orig­i­nal, and unmis­tak­ably sin­is­ter.

Equal­ly dis­turb­ing is the let­ter­ing on Eeyore’s home­made grave mark­er. (SPOILER: as per Vari­ety, a starv­ing Pooh and Piglet ate him…and appar­ent­ly dis­card­ed a human skull near­by.)

The “enchant­ed neigh­bor­hood of Christo­pher’s child­hood days” has gone decid­ed­ly down­hill.

Direc­tor Frake-Water­field paints Pooh and Piglet as the pri­ma­ry vil­lains, but sure­ly the col­lege-bound Christo­pher Robin deserves some of the blame for aban­don­ing his old friends.

On the oth­er hand, when a col­lege-bound Andy tossed his beloved child­hood play­things in a give­away box at the begin­ning of Toy Sto­ry 3, Buzz and Woody did not go on a mur­der­ous ram­page.

As Frake-Water­field described Pooh and Piglet’s devo­lu­tion to Huff­Post:

Because they’ve had to fend for them­selves so much, they’ve essen­tial­ly become fer­al. So they’ve gone back to their ani­mal roots. They’re no longer tame: they’re like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.

An inter­view with Dread Cen­tral offers a graph­ic taste of the vio­lent may­hem they inflict, even as Christo­pher Robin, as clue­less as a biki­ni clad inno­cent in a hot tub, bleats, “We used to be friends, why are you doing this!?”

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the film’s tagline is “This Ain’t No Bed­time Sto­ry.”

View pro­duc­tion pho­tos, if you dare, here.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Her alle­giance has long been with the 1926 ver­sion. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Ris­es, Win­nie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Come­dies & More

Hear the Clas­sic Win­nie-the-Pooh Read by Author A.A. Milne in 1929

The Orig­i­nal Stuffed Ani­mals That Inspired Win­nie the Pooh

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Kino Lorber Puts Online 75 Free Films

in Film | September 2nd, 2022

Even cinephiles who know lit­tle of the busi­ness of film dis­tri­b­u­tion will have devel­oped asso­ci­a­tions, how­ev­er uncon­scious, between cer­tain pre-fea­ture cor­po­rate logos and the exhil­a­rat­ing cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences that tend to fol­low. What sort of pic­ture comes to mind, for exam­ple, when you read the name Kino Lor­ber? Per­haps doc­u­men­taries on such com­pelling sub­jects as New York Times street-fash­ion pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bill Cun­ning­ham or gone-viral Win­neba­go pitch­man Jack Reb­ney; per­haps inter­na­tion­al genre spec­ta­cles of recent years like Ana Lily Amir­pour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Hélène Cat­tet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan.

Then again, your own taste in Kino Lor­ber-dis­trib­uted movies may run to the likes of Good­bye to Lan­guage, Jean-Luc Godard­’s 2014 med­i­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly screened in 3D — or Derek Jar­man’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal last tes­ta­ment Blue, which plays out entire­ly on a sol­id field of the epony­mous col­or.

These are just a few of the more than 75 films now avail­able free to watch on Kino Lor­ber’s Youtube chan­nel. (Note that the actu­al num­ber of view­able films may vary depend­ing on your loca­tion.) Span­ning var­i­ous eras, gen­res, ori­gins, and forms, togeth­er they offer a sense of the niche Kino Lor­ber has carved out for itself dur­ing its 45 years in busi­ness so far.

You may spot an old favorite on Kino Lor­ber’s Youtube chan­nel, but the greater joy of explor­ing it lies in dis­cov­er­ing films you missed the first time around. Gabe Klinger’s Por­to, for instance, went prac­ti­cal­ly unseen despite its evoca­tive vision of the title city and posthu­mous show­case of acclaimed actor Anton Yelchin. Boast­ing a cast of Phoebe Cates, Brid­get Fon­da, Tim Roth, and Eric Stoltz, Michael Stein­berg’s Bod­ies, Rest & Motion screened at Cannes as an Un Cer­tain Regard selec­tion back in 1993; sure­ly the time has come for its reap­praisal as a dis­til­la­tion of Generation‑X ennui. Even Tai­ka Wait­i­ti once made less­er-known movies in and about his native New Zealand. Thanks to Kino Lor­ber, his fans can can watch Boy, which launched him on the jour­ney that has made him one of the most glob­al­ly pop­u­lar direc­tors alive. See the com­plete playlist of films here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

365 Free Movies Stream­ing on YouTube

Watch 70+ Sovi­et Films Free Online, Cour­tesy of Mos­film, the Hol­ly­wood of the Sovi­et Union

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

Watch Hun­dreds of Pol­ish Films Free Online: Fea­ture Films, Doc­u­men­taries, Ani­ma­tions & More

The Atom­ic Café: The Cult Clas­sic Doc­u­men­tary Made Entire­ly Out of Nuclear Weapons Pro­pa­gan­da from the Cold War (1982)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert Streaming Live from Wembley Stadium: Watch It Online

in Music | September 2nd, 2022

The Foo Fight­ers have teamed up with Tay­lor Hawkins’ fam­i­ly to stream world­wide their all-star cel­e­bra­tion of the leg­endary drum­mer. Above you can stream the Tay­lor Hawkins Trib­ute Con­cert tak­ing place in Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um.  Note: if you missed the begin­ning, you can scroll the video back to the very start.

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 

Watch the Foo Fight­ers’ Tay­lor Hawkins (RIP) Give a Drum­ming Mas­ter­class

1,000 Musi­cians Per­form “My Hero” in a Mov­ing Trib­ute to Foo Fight­ers’ Drum­mer Tay­lor Hawkins

Watch 1,000 Musi­cians Play the Foo Fight­ers’ “Learn to Fly,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

Dave Grohl Falls Off­stage & Breaks His Leg, Then Con­tin­ues the Show as The Foo Fight­ers Play Queen’s “Under Pres­sure” (2015)

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What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Creates Images to Match the Lyrics of Iconic Songs: David Bowie’s “Starman,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” & More

in Artificial Intelligence, Music, Technology | September 1st, 2022

Lyri­cists must write con­crete­ly enough to be evoca­tive, yet vague­ly enough to allow each lis­ten­er his per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion. The nine­teen-six­ties and sev­en­ties saw an espe­cial­ly rich bal­ance struck between res­o­nant ambi­gu­i­ty and mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty — aid­ed, as many involved par­ties have admit­ted, by the use of cer­tain psy­choac­tive sub­stances. Half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the visions induced by those same sub­stances offer the clos­est com­par­i­son to the strik­ing fruits of visu­al arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence projects like Google’s Deep Dream a few years ago or DALL‑E today. Only nat­ur­al, per­haps, that these advanced appli­ca­tions would soon­er or lat­er be fed psy­che­del­ic song lyrics.

The video at the top of the post presents the Elec­tric Light Orches­tra’s 1977 hit “Mr. Blue Sky” illus­trat­ed by images gen­er­at­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence straight from its words. This came as a much-antic­i­pat­ed endeav­or for Youtube chan­nel SolarProphet, which has also put up sim­i­lar­ly AI-accom­pa­nied pre­sen­ta­tions of such already goofy-image-filled com­e­dy songs as Lemon Demon’s “The Ulti­mate Show­down” and Neil Ciciere­ga’s “It’s Gonna Get Weird.”

Youtu­ber Daara has also cre­at­ed ten entries in this new genre, includ­ing Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” The Eagles’ “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia,” and (the recent­ly-fea­tured-on-Open-Cul­ture) Kate Bush’s “Run­ning Up That Hill.”

Jut above appears a video for David Bowie’s “Star­man” with AI-visu­al­ized lyrics, cre­at­ed by Youtu­ber Aidon­t­know. Cre­at­ed isn’t too strong a word, since DALL‑E and oth­er appli­ca­tions cur­rent­ly avail­able to the pub­lic pro­vide a selec­tion of images for each prompt, leav­ing it to human users to pro­vide specifics about the aes­thet­ic — and, in the case of these videos, to select the result that best suits each line. One delight of this par­tic­u­lar pro­duc­tion, apart from the boo­gieing chil­dren, is see­ing how the AI imag­ines var­i­ous star­men wait­ing in the sky, all of whom look sus­pi­cious­ly like ear­ly-sev­en­ties Bowie. Of all his songs of that peri­od, sure­ly “Life on Mars?” would be choice num­ber one for an AI music video — but then, its imagery may well be too bizarre for cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy to han­dle.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er DALL‑E, the Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Artist That Lets You Cre­ate Sur­re­al Art­work

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

What Hap­pens When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Lis­tens to John Coltrane’s Inter­stel­lar Space & Starts to Cre­ate Its Own Free Jazz

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Dif­fer­ence Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ates Real­is­tic Pho­tos of Peo­ple, None of Whom Actu­al­ly Exist

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Elton John Presents 14 of His Iconic Looks: From 1968 to Now

in Fashion, Music | September 1st, 2022

Elton John is pack­ing up his fab­u­lous out­fits and hit­ting stages for the last time, mak­ing a grace­ful exit from the road at age 75 with his “Farewell Yel­low Brick Road” tour. He will, of course, make a stop at Dodger Sta­di­um, where he played one of his most famous con­certs in 1975, strid­ing onto the stage in a sequined Dodgers uni­form, one of many shim­mer­ing cos­tumes he would don dur­ing the 3‑hour marathon set.

When John played Dodger sta­di­um, his songs had been “hit­ting the air­waves with a sense of fan­tas­ti­cal futur­ism,” writes Far Out, “all pack­aged in flam­boy­ant cos­tumes and dressed in num­ber one albums. Loved by crit­ics and adored by fans, he resem­bled some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent.” Dif­fer­ent from what?

John answered that ques­tion in a 2020 inter­view with Vogue: “I was­n’t glam rock. I was­n’t David Bowie. I was me being a blokey guy wear­ing these clothes. I had to have humor in my cos­tume.” Thus, his turns as Don­ald Duck, Min­nie Mouse, and the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, all cos­tumes “designed to com­ple­ment the cor­re­spond­ing per­for­mance,” Janelle Okwodu writes at Vogue.

John may not have thought of him­self as a glam rock super­star, but his lega­cy of sparkling, sequined out­fits, plat­form boots, feath­er boas, and bluesy rock hits says oth­er­wise. In the video above, see the retir­ing Rock­et­man break down his most icon­ic looks. “Let’s begin,” he says, “at the very begin­ning” — decades before design­er Sean Dixon tai­lored 30 bespoke suits (at 90 hours each to make) for John’s 2018 Mil­lion Dol­lar Piano show.

In 1968, John donned bell bot­toms, a three-but­ton jack­et, and a fedo­ra for his first pub­lic­i­ty shot. “That was prob­a­bly all I could afford, and it shows,” he remarks. Not a sin­gle Swarovs­ki crys­tal in sight. In the ear­ly 70s, it was den­im, “and I absolute­ly loathe den­im now.” In 1997, for his 50th birth­day par­ty, John appeared in glo­ri­ous full drag ensem­ble made by Sandy Pow­ell, but in his lat­er years, he’s most­ly dressed down.… which for Elton John means chang­ing into an end­less series of bespoke, bedaz­zled suits.

Now that he’s head­ing into retire­ment from per­form­ing, we may be enti­tled to won­der about his bathrobe col­lec­tion.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Elton John Takes Us Through the Cre­ative Process of His Ear­ly Hit “Tiny Dancer” (1970)

Revis­it Six of Elton John’s Most Icon­ic Con­certs, Stream­ing in Their Entire­ty for 72 Hours

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

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

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