At OC HQ you will find two Bialetti espresso makers on the stove–one small, the other large–and together they power us through the day. Invented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, the octagonal, Art Deco-designed coffee maker eventually became a staple in Italian homes (90% of them), thanks to his son Renato, who died last week at the age of 93. A savvy marketer to the end, Bialetti went to the grave with his product, buried, as he was, in an espresso maker that doubled as an urn. All in all, I can’t think of much better ways to spend eternity.
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I knew such things as comedy albums existed. I’d spied a couple of them in my parent’s record collection. But they seemed like such quaint and dated things. After all, I’d grown up on Eddie Murphy’s scandalous HBO specials, had seen George Carlin and Richard Pryor pace the stage delivering epic comic commentary. I had imbibed a steady stream of standup and sketches on Comedy Central. What need had I of a comedy album?! The facial expressions, rare props, ridiculous outfits… weren’t these visual cues necessary to carry the jokes?
Then I heard Lenny Bruce’s live double album from his 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and flipped out (hear an excerpt above). I didn’t know very much about Bruce at the time—not much more than the name. But after listening to that record enough times to memorize every line and inflection, I became very interested in how comedians brought listeners to tears of laughter with only their voices. Bruce was a master. “Onstage,” writes Richard Brody, “he was a one-man cartoon, doing all the voices and poses of movie parodies that he infused with his own stringent and paradoxical morality.” So cartoonish was his act at times that one joke became an actual cartoon—“Thank You Mask Man,” a NSFW classic.
Bruce’s act swung like a jazz performance, sometimes hitting a blue note, and pulling his audience down with a serious scene, then ramping right up into wild, nasal runs of high-pitched comic virtuosity. Other comics, like the deadpan Bob Newhart, hardly ever varied their volume, tempo, and tone, and therein lay the understated appeal of Newhart’s “Button-Down Mind.” Then there are the characters and impressions of Lily Tomlin, the unhinged rants of Richard Pryor, the screaming of Sam Kinison, the narcoleptic drone of Steven Wright, the childlike warble of Emo Philips… Every comic uses his or her voice as an instrument, tapping into the audience’s musical sense of rhythm and timing as much as their intellectual sense of irony and absurdity.
Today, we bring you a playlist of 30+ standup comedy albums, ranging from current comic masters like Amy Schumer, Tig Notaro, and Louis C.K. to beloved comics from decades past like Gilda Radner and Bill Hicks. (You can purchase copies of these classic albums here.) We’ve got the famous duo of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (yes, they do “2000 Year Old Man”), we’ve got Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and even… hell, why not? Andrew Dice Clay. And Lenny Bruce’s Carnegie Hall Concert made the cut as well, an absolute must-hear. Most of these picks were chosen by Open Culture readers on Twitter, with a few taken from this Spin list of the “40 Greatest Comedy Albums of All Time.” If there’s an album you think we absolutely have to add to the playlist above, let us know in the comments. If you don’t have Spotify, download it free here. And if you object to using the service, why not preview some of these, then go buy the ones that crack you up the hardest? All of the albums on the playlist can be found on Amazon here.
Taught by award-winning filmmakers from a range of specialties, including Brian Tufano and Mike Figgis, it covers everything from storytelling, to budgeting, to understanding the impact of a soundtrack.
Here, for instance, is Brian Tufano, the established cinematographer, talking about filming the infamous toilet scene in Trainspotting — turns out you can do a great deal using half a toilet and the technique trompe-l’œil (“fool the eye”).
As part of the course, you can also can also watch shorts from recent graduates of the NFTS (a few of which are already collecting awards) and get recommended videos from the Bafta Guru collection — a site dedicated to getting new blood into the industry.
The free course, Explore Filmmaking, is offered through FutureLearn and gives you the chance to trade opinions with thousands of other film buffs online, plus get comments as the weeks go by from the filmmakers teaching the course.
Here’s the breakdown of what the course covers:
1 — Introduction: how does a film get from script to screen?
Nik Powell, director of the NFTS and producer of more than 40 films, including The Crying Game, Mona Lisa and Company of Wolves.
2 — Storytelling: what’s the difference between plot and theme?
Destiny Ekharaga, director of Gone Too Far.
3 — Decisions: how to choose budget, schedule, location and kit?
Mike Figgis, director of Leaving Las Vegas, TimeCode and Internal Affairs.
4 — The scene: how does a director make choices on set?
Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow, recently announced director of a re-make of The Crow, and director of music videos for artists such as The Prodigy, Olly Murrs and Devlin.
5 — Time and space: how does editing affect meaning?
Justine Wright, editor of Touching the Void, The Iron Lady and Locke.
6 — Sound and music: what is the impact of a film’s soundtrack?
Danny Hambrook, sound designer of Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Le Weekend, production sound mixer on Rush.
In short — there will be no more excuses for wrongly orientated iPhone videos. Oh and please don’t forget to namecheck Open Culture and FutureLearn in your Oscar acceptance speech.
Jess Weeks is a copywriter at FutureLearn. Along with the rest of the FutureLearn team, she’s based in the British Library in London. Yes, it is occasionally like Harry Potter.
Anthropology, authenticity, medieval aesthetics, the media, literary theory, conspiracy theory, semiotics, ugliness: the late Umberto Eco, as anyone who’s read a piece of his bibliography (which includes such intellectually serious but thoroughly entertaining novels as The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and the still-new Numero Zero) can attest, had the widest possible range of interests. That infinite-seeming list extended even to comic strips, and especially Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (which did tend to fascinate literati, even those of very different traditions).
Just over thirty years ago, the Italian novelist-essayist-critic-philosopher-semiotician wrote an essay in TheNew York Review of Books about what made that strip one of the most, if not the most compelling of the twentieth century.
“The cast of characters is elementary,” writes Eco, rattling off the names and later enumerating the resonant qualities of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Violet, Patty, Frieda, Linus, Schroeder, Pig Pen, and “the dog Snoopy, who is involved in their games and their talk.” But from this simple design arises a rich and complex reader experience:
Over this basic scheme, there is a steady flow of variations, following a rhythm found in certain primitive epics. (Primitive, too, is the habit of referring to the protagonist always by his full name—even his mother addresses Charlie Brown in that fashion, like an epic hero.) Thus you could never grasp the poetic power of Schulz’s work by reading only one or two or ten episodes: you must thoroughly understand the characters and the situations, for the grace, tenderness, and laughter are born only from the infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns, and from fidelity to the fundamental inspirations. They demand from the reader a continuous act of empathy, a participation in the inner warmth that pervades the events.
In this sense, Peanuts succeeds on the same level as Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s highly absurd, highly artistic, and enormously respected strip (though it sometimes took up entire pages) that ran from 1913 to 1944. Thanks only to the earlier work’s rigorous adherence to themes and variations, Eco writes, “the mouse’s arrogance, the dog’s unrewarded compassion, and the cat’s desperate love could arrive at what many critics felt was a genuine state of poetry, an uninterrupted elegy based on sorrowing innocence.” But Peanuts’ cast of children adds another dimension entirely:
The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage. These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization.
They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence. Schulz’s children are not a sly instrument to handle our adult problems: they experience these problems according to a childish psychology, and for this very reason they seem to us touching and hopeless, as if we were suddenly aware that our ills have polluted everything, at the root.
But the capacious mind of Eco finds even more than that in the outwardly humble Schulz’s work. If we read enough of it, “we realize that we have emerged from the banal round of consumption and escapism, and have almost reached the threshold of meditation.” And astonishingly, it works equally well for all audiences: “Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity, as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys.” And Schultz continues, even sixteen years after his own death and the strip’s end, to show us, “in the face of Charlie Brown, with two strokes of his pencil, his version of the human condition.”
Several weeks back, you might recall, Stephen Hawking delivered two Reith lectures over the radio airwaves of the BBC –one called “Do Black Holes Have No Hair?,” the other “Black Holes Ain’t as Black as They Are Painted.” Both were featured here, accompanied by some lively chalkboard animations.
Above you can watch an outtake from the second lecture, this time animated in a different aesthetic. It’s trippy, hypnotic, and unless you’re grounded in the material, the talk will leave you a little baffled–at least until the end, when Hawking leaves us with a life-affirming message anyone can relate to. “If you feel like you’re in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” At once, he’s talking literally about black holes that are no longer thought to consume everything they encounter, and the metaphorical ones we all run into, somewhere along the way, in life.
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!
Eco’s passing adds some poignancy to a video he recorded just last year, on behalf of The Louisiana Channel, a media outlet based, of all places, in Denmark. In the clip above, Eco gives some counsel to aspiring writers: Keep your ego in check, and your ambitions, realistic. Put in the time and the hard work, and don’t shoot for the Nobel Prize in Literature straight out of the gate. That, Eco says, kills every literary career. And remember that writing is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” They’re truisms–you discover after spending decades as a writer–that turn out to be true. That confirmation is one of the gifts he leaves behind.
If I could send a message back in time, I might send it to the wide-eyed and skyward-looking children of 1960s America, apologizing that we never did build those jetpacks, flying cars, and moon colonies, but also letting them know that at least we, the citizens of the 21st century, have developed such technologies as smartphones and a myriad of ways for snack foods to taste both sweet and salty at once.
I probably wouldn’t tell them how many of us long for the spirit of their own time, which American history has labeled “the Space Age” for good reason. It had its share of awfulness, starting with the apocalyptic tensions of the Cold War, but that competition between societies did spur mankind to voyage boldly and unhesitatingly out into the great beyond, at least for a while there.
“Back in the 1930s and ’40s, during the height of the Great Depression,” writes Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, “artists designed posters for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) to encourage travel to national parks and other tourist sites in the United States. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) design studio is taking a similar approach to promote a future of travel to other planets at a time when its funding is up against budget constraints and even a journey to our galactic neighbor Mars may seem almost impossible.” And so we have this brand new series of fourteen Visions of the Future, free to download, print, and hang above your desk to fuel your own outer-space daydreaming.
You’ll notice that all the artists commissioned have designed their space-travel posters—whether they promote the high gravity of the “super Earth” exoplanet HD 40307g, the one-day “Historic Sites of Mars,” or the “Grand Tour” of the Solar System—in a richly retro style reminiscent of 1930s air travel advertisements. This makes them artistically captivating, but also emphasizes the continuity between our present, the century behind us, and the centuries ahead. “As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations,” says NASA/JPL’s site, “remember that you can be an architect of the future” — and every future worthy of the name comes built solidly upon a past.
It’s the stuff of legend. Honoré de Balzac cranked out 50+ novels in 20 years and died at 51. The cause? Too much work and caffeine. How much coffee? Up to 50 cups per day, they say.
A quick fyi: You now stream for a limited time Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin. The new album features Nelson covering 11 classic songs written by George and Ira Gershwin. And it includes duets with Cyndi Lauper and Sheryl Crow. You can stream the album (due to be officially released on February 26th) right below, or hear it over on NPR’s First Listen site. Enjoy.
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!
Free will often seems like nothing more than a cruel illusion. We don’t get to choose the times, places, and circumstances of our birth, nor do we have much control over the state of our states, regions, or nations. Even the few who can design conditions such that they are always secure and comfortable find themselves unavoidably subject to what Buddhists call the “divine messengers” of sickness, aging, and death. Biology may not be destiny, but it is a force more powerful than many of our best intentions. And though most of us in the West have the privilege of living far away from war zones, millions across the world face extremities we can only imagine, and to which we are not immune by any stretch.
Among all of the psychiatrists, philosophers, and religious figures who have wrestled with these universal truths about the human condition, perhaps none has been put to the test quite like neurologist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, but lost his mother, father, brother, and first wife to the camps.
While imprisoned, he faced what he described as “an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself.” After his camp was liberated in 1945, Frankl published an extraordinary book about his experiences: Man’s Search for Meaning, “a strangely hopeful book,” writes Matthew Scully at First Things, “still a staple on the self-help shelves” though it is “inescapably a book about death.” The book has seen dozens of editions in dozens of languages and ranks 9th on a list of most influential books.
Frankl’s thesis echoes those of many sages, from Buddhists to Stoics to his 20th century Existentialist contemporaries: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Not only did he find hope and meaning in the midst of terrible suffering, but after his unimaginable loss, he “remarried, wrote another twenty-five books, founded a school of psychotherapy, built an institute bearing his name in Vienna,” and generally lived a long, happy life. How? The interview above will give you some idea. Frankl maintains that we always have some freedom of choice, “in spite of the worst conditions,” and therefore always have the ability to seek for meaning. “People are free,” says Frankl, no matter their level of oppression, and are responsible “for making someone or something out of themselves.”
Frankl’s primary achievement as a psychotherapist was to found the school of “logotherapy,” a successor to Freudian psychoanalysis and Adlerian individual psychology. Drawing on Existentialist philosophy (Frankl’s book was published in Germany with the alternate title From Concentration Camp to Existentialism)—but turning away from an obsession with the Absurd—his approach, writes his institute, “is based on three philosophical and psychological concepts… Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.”
You can hear how Frankl works these principles into his philosophy in the fascinating interview, as well as in the short clip above from an earlier lecture, in which he rails against a crude and ultimately unfulfilling form of meaning-making: the pursuit of wealth. Even us materialistic Americans, renowned for our greed, Frankl notes with good humor, respond to surveys in overwhelming numbers saying our greatest desire is to find meaning and purpose in life. Like no other secular voice, Frankl was confident that we could do so, in spite of life’s seeming chaos, through—as he explains above—a kind of idealism that brings us closer to reality.
Note: You can download Frankl’s major book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” as a free audio book if you join Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial program. Find details on that here.
If an entire generation of American adults suffers from Cinematic Chicken Vs. Egg Syndrome, it’s The Simpsons’ fault.
Editor Celia Gómez’ side-by-side shot comparison above makes plain how a 30-year-old Citizen Kane virgin could experience a sense of deja vu on his or her inaugural viewing. The Simpsons pulled from it for “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” when said viewer was but a little tot. Three years later, they did it again wit 1993’s “Rosebud.”
Parents who would never have allowed their sensitive little darlings in the room while screening Full Metal Jacketor Requiem for a Dreamrelaxed their vigilance where the family from Springfield was concerned.
When The Simpsons’ kilted Groundskeeper Willie chastely recrosses his legs in an interrogation room, no kid is going to fixate on what lies beneath. (FYI, it’s a notoriously commando Sharon Stone in 1992’s NSFW thriller, Basic Instinct.)
Want a crash course in The Godfather? Watch the Simpsons.
No offense to the human actors who originated the roles, but it’s incredible how the animators can imbue their characters with all the relevant emotions. Their eyes are little more than dots on pingpong balls! (Check out Homer’s dead expression on 1994’s Terminator 2 parody, “Homer Loves Flanders.”)
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