David Bowie Sells Ice Cream, Sake, Coke & Water: Watch His TV Commercials from the 1960s Through 2013

in Music | January 14th, 2016

As the mourn­ing peri­od for David Bowie con­tin­ues this week, for which I am very much tak­ing part (my favorite Bowie is the Berlin tril­o­gy Bowie in case you’re inter­est­ed), the Inter­net con­tin­ues through its own stages of grief. First brief news sto­ries and anec­dotes from fel­low artists, then long think-pieces (some very good), then to best-of lists, and now to inter­est­ing ephemera.

For an artist who saw both sides of com­mer­cial suc­cess, Bowie’s tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial appear­ances num­ber less than a dozen over his life. Part of that comes from his mas­tery and con­trol over his image–he knew when to go out, and when to stay in, to get things done, you might say–and part may come from his ear­ly his­to­ry behind the scenes where the com­mer­cial sausage gets made.

In 1963, Bowie left school to go work at Nevin D. Hirst Adver­tis­ing on London’s Bond Street, where he worked as a sto­ry­board artist for about a year, a job he took to please his father. Although he was dis­mis­sive of that time doing his 9‑to‑5, it was lat­er clear to friends, band mates, and biog­ra­phers that he had picked up a lot from advertising–how to pack­age him­self, how to manip­u­late feel­ing, the pow­er of image and words.

Jump for­ward to 1967 and a long haired Davy Jones makes one of his ear­li­est appear­ances in this ice cream ad for Luv “The Pop Ice Cream,” direct­ed by anoth­er up-and-com­er, Rid­ley Scott, who had recent­ly made his first short film, “A Boy and a Bicy­cle.” It’s groovy, but, as Luv’s not around any more, appar­ent­ly didn’t move enough units.

And then Davy Jones turns into Major Tom and the ‘70s belonged to him. He final­ly agrees in 1980 to do a com­mer­cial, but only in Japan. In this min­i­mal ad for Crys­tal Jun Rock Sake, Bowie looks beau­ti­ful, hand­some, and sleek, right at the height of his sophis­ti­cat­ed Lodger-era glam­our. He plays a piano, gazes at a post-mod­ern Mt. Fuji, and utters one word: “Crys­tal.” Bowie wrote the music, an out­take from the Lodger ses­sions, and it was released as a sin­gle in Japan, and a b‑side in the West. Bowie com­ment­ed that “the mon­ey is a use­ful thing” for doing ads like this, out of sight from the West.

The next time Bowie appears is in 1983, call­ing out for Amer­i­cans to demand their MTV in a series of roto­scoped and col­orized ads near the dawn of the net­work. (This is a bad­ly edit­ed com­pi­la­tion of Bowie’s spots).

If Bowie had yet to “sell out” it was only four years lat­er, dur­ing the Glass Spi­der Tour, that he did, with this re-word­ed, re-record­ed ver­sion of “Mod­ern Love,” duet­ting with Tina Turn­er. At the time it felt like the end of a career that had turned Bowie into an over­ly coiffed par­o­dy of him­self. In ret­ro­spect, if you can look past the soda, it’s a cute com­mer­cial, with the star look­ing a bit like “Blind­ed by Science”-era Thomas Dol­by.

Then more silence and, by the time Bowie reap­pears in 2001, it is lit­er­al­ly as the man who falls to earth in an ad for XM satel­lite radio. (Bowie made yet anoth­er appear­ance in an XM ad in 2005.)

In 2004, he appears again, shilling Vit­tel water. Here Bowie’s in full career ret­ro­spec­tive mode, mak­ing peace with his chameleon self and appre­ci­at­ing it all. Set to the Real­i­ty track “Nev­er Get Old” (our dear wish that was not to be), it fea­tures Bowie trib­ute per­former David Brighton try­ing on every out­fit from the Starman’s crowd­ed wardrobe in a house filled with incar­na­tions.

That leaves us with his final tele­vi­sion ad appear­ance in 2013, seen at the top of this post, still look­ing fit, and per­form­ing a baroque ver­sion of The Next Day track “I’d Rather Be High” for a Venet­ian ball-set ad for Louis Vuit­ton. Fit­ting to go out sur­round­ed by beau­ty and glam­or, but check those lyrics:

I stum­ble to the grave­yard and I
Lay down by my par­ents, whis­per
Just remem­ber duck­ies
Every­body gets got

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recre­ate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

The Mak­ing of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit “Under Pres­sure”: Demos, Stu­dio Ses­sions & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How to Take Advantage of Boredom, the Secret Ingredient of Creativity

in Creativity, Psychology | January 14th, 2016

Pierre-Auguste_Renoir_-_La_Tasse_de_chocolat

Pierre-August Renoir, La Tasse de choco­lat

Last year we told you about the impor­tance of messy desks and walk­ing to cre­ativ­i­ty. This year, the time has come to real­ize how much cre­ativ­i­ty also depends on bore­dom. In a sense, of course, humankind has utter­ly van­quished bore­dom, what with our mod­ern tech­nolo­gies — com­put­ers, high-speed inter­net, smart­phones — that make pos­si­ble sources of rich and fre­quent stim­u­la­tion such as, well, this very site. But what if we need a lit­tle bore­dom? What if bore­dom, that state we 21st-cen­tu­ry first-worlders wor­ry about avoid­ing more than any oth­er, actu­al­ly helps us cre­ate?

Even if we feel no bore­dom in our free time, sure­ly we still endure the occa­sion­al bout of it at work. “Admit­ting that bore­dom to cowork­ers or man­agers is like­ly some­thing few of us have ever done,” writes the Har­vard Busi­ness Review’s David Burkus. “It turns out, how­ev­er, that a cer­tain lev­el of bore­dom might actu­al­ly enhance the cre­ative qual­i­ty of our work.”

He cites a well-known sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ment which found that vol­un­teers did bet­ter at a cre­ative task (like find­ing dif­fer­ent uses for a pair of plas­tic cups) when first sub­ject­ed to a bor­ing one (like copy­ing num­bers out of the phone book) which “height­ens the ‘day­dream­ing effect’ on cre­ativ­i­ty — the more pas­sive the bore­dom, the more like­ly the day­dream­ing and the more cre­ative you could be after­ward.”

Burkus also refers to anoth­er paper doc­u­ment­ing the per­for­mance of dif­fer­ent sub­jects on word-asso­ci­a­tion tests after watch­ing dif­fer­ent video clips, one of them delib­er­ate­ly bor­ing. Who came up with the most cre­ative asso­ci­a­tions? You guessed it: those who watched the bor­ing video first. Bore­dom, the exper­i­menters sug­gest, “moti­vates peo­ple to approach new and reward­ing activ­i­ties. In oth­er words, an idle mind will seek a toy. (Any­one who has tak­en a long car ride with a young child has sure­ly expe­ri­enced some ver­sion of this phe­nom­e­non.)”

Writ­ing about those same exper­i­ments, Fast Com­pa­ny’s Vivian Giang quotes researcher Andreas Elpi­dorou of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisville as claim­ing that “bore­dom helps to restore the per­cep­tion that one’s activ­i­ties are mean­ing­ful or sig­nif­i­cant.” He describes it as a “reg­u­la­to­ry state that keeps one in line with one’s projects. In the absence of bore­dom, one would remain trapped in unful­fill­ing sit­u­a­tions, and miss out on many emo­tion­al­ly, cog­ni­tive­ly, and social­ly reward­ing expe­ri­ences. Bore­dom is both a warn­ing that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that moti­vates us to switch goals and projects.”

“Bore­dom is a fas­ci­nat­ing emo­tion because it is seen as so neg­a­tive yet it is such a moti­vat­ing force,” says Dr. San­di Mann of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Lan­cashire, one of the mas­ter­minds of the exper­i­ments with the phone book and the plas­tic cups, quot­ed by Tele­graph sci­ence edi­tor Sarah Knap­ton. “Being bored is not the bad thing every­one makes it out to be. It is good to be bored some­times! I think up so many ideas when I am com­mut­ing to and from work – this would be dead time, but thanks to the bore­dom it induces, I come up with all sorts of projects.” (This also man­i­fests in her par­ent­ing: “I am quite hap­py when my kids whine that they are bored,” she said: “Find­ing ways to amuse them­selves is an impor­tant skill.”)

Nearly_the_weekend

“Near­ly the Week­end,” by David Feltkamp. Cre­ative Com­mons image

How to make use of all this? “Tak­en togeth­er,” Burkus writes, “these stud­ies sug­gest that the bore­dom so com­mon­ly felt at work could actu­al­ly be lever­aged to help us get our work done bet­ter,” per­haps by “spend­ing some focused time on hum­drum activ­i­ties such as answer­ing emails, mak­ing copies, or enter­ing data,” after which “we may be bet­ter able to think up more (and more cre­ative) pos­si­bil­i­ties to explore.” In the words of Dr. Mann her­self, “Bore­dom at work has always been seen as some­thing to be elim­i­nat­ed, but per­haps we should be embrac­ing it in order to enhance our cre­ativ­i­ty.” And so to an even more inter­est­ing ques­tion: “Do peo­ple who are bored at work become more cre­ative in oth­er areas of their work – or do they go home and write nov­els?”

David Fos­ter Wal­lace took on the rela­tion­ship between bore­dom and cre­ativ­i­ty in an ambi­tious way when he start­ed writ­ing The Pale King, his unfin­ished nov­el (which he pri­vate­ly called “the Long Thing”) set in an Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice branch office in mid-1980s Peo­ria. The papers relat­ed to the project he left behind includ­ed a note about the book’s larg­er theme:

It turns out that bliss – a sec­ond-by-sec­ond joy + grat­i­tude at the gift of being alive, con­scious – lies on the oth­er side of crush­ing, crush­ing bore­dom. Pay close atten­tion to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, tele­vised golf), and, in waves, a bore­dom like you’ve nev­er known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like step­ping from black and white into col­or. Like water after days in the desert. Con­stant bliss in every atom.

This, as well as the more every­day sug­ges­tions about work­ing more cre­ative­ly by doing the bor­ing bits first, would seem to share a basis with the ancient tra­di­tion of med­i­ta­tion. If indeed human­i­ty has gone too far in its mis­sion to alle­vi­ate the dis­com­fort of bore­dom, it has pro­duced the even more per­ni­cious con­di­tion in which we all feel con­stant­ly and unthink­ing­ly des­per­ate for new dis­trac­tions (which Shop Class as Soul­craft author Matthew B. Craw­ford mem­o­rably called “obe­si­ty of the mind”) while know­ing full well that those dis­trac­tions keep us from our impor­tant work, be it design­ing a sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ment, com­ing up with a sales strat­e­gy, or writ­ing a nov­el.

Maybe we can undo some of the dam­age by delib­er­ate­ly, reg­u­lar­ly shut­ting off our per­son­al flow of inter­est­ing sen­so­ry input for a while, whether through med­i­ta­tion, data entry, phone-book copy­ing, of whichev­er method feels right to you. (WNY­C’s Manoush Zomoro­di even launched a project last year called “Bored and Bril­liant: The Lost Art of Spac­ing Out,” which chal­lenged lis­ten­ers to min­i­mize their phone-check­ing and put the time gained to more cre­ative use.)  But we all need some high-qual­i­ty stim­u­la­tion soon­er or lat­er, so when you feel ready for anoth­er dose of it, you know where to find us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

The Psy­chol­o­gy of Messi­ness & Cre­ativ­i­ty: Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Cre­ative Work Go Hand in Hand

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Are You One of the 2% Who Can Solve “Einstein’s Riddle”?

in Random | January 14th, 2016

It’s some­times called “Ein­stein’s Rid­dle” because, accord­ing to leg­end, Ein­stein invent­ed it as a child. Oth­ers say that the puz­zle was actu­al­ly designed by Lewis Car­roll, best known as the author of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land. (Car­roll was also a logi­cian.) Where did this brain teas­er orig­i­nate? We’re not real­ly sure. Per­haps it was a 1962 issue of Life Inter­na­tion­al mag­a­zine.

In any event, “Ein­stein’s Rid­dle” is a good test of your men­tal agili­ty. They say that only 2% of the pop­u­la­tion can solve the prob­lem. The TED-Ed video above will walk you through one ver­sion of the rid­dle. If you don’t want any assis­tance, you can find oth­er ver­sions online.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

Albert Ein­stein Impos­es on His First Wife a Cru­el List of Mar­i­tal Demands

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

Free Online Physics Cours­es

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Download 650 Soviet Book Covers, Many Sporting Wonderful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

in Archives, Books, Design | January 14th, 2016

Circus 1931

Amer­i­cans like to pride our­selves on the numer­ous ways our pop cul­ture pen­e­trat­ed the Sovi­et Union and seduced its young­sters, send­ing them to bed with dreams of Mick­ey Mouse, Bil­lie Hol­i­day, Elvis, and Star Wars. Whether it’s jazz in the ear­ly decades after the rev­o­lu­tion, or rock and roll in the 50s and after, Sovi­et youth so craved the ways of the West, it seems, that they famous­ly boot­legged Amer­i­can music on used X‑rays, with results of wide­ly vary­ing degrees of qual­i­ty. That’s all well and good, but we rarely ask what Sovi­et cul­tur­al exports we were miss­ing while we trum­pet­ed our supe­ri­or­i­ty. (I mean, besides Ayn Rand or the com­e­dy of Yakov Smirnoff.)

Unknown Soviet Cover 1

A few of those exports have become high water­marks of cre­ative inno­va­tion and aes­thet­ic beau­ty, such as the film­mak­ing of Dzi­ga Ver­tov and Andrei Tarkovsky. At least one Sovi­et export, the Theremin, rad­i­cal­ized music with its haunt­ing elec­tron­ic whine. Much less well-known, how­ev­er, are the fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ments in ani­ma­tion and illus­tra­tion (such as these out­er space utopias). Now—thanks to the New York Pub­lic Library’s huge­ly expan­sive, free dig­i­tal image archive—we can view and down­load 650 exam­ples of Sovi­et book cov­er design between the years 1917 and 1942 (most date from the 30s). Many of these cov­ers are as unre­mark­ably vanil­la as some of their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts, but no small num­ber offer unique looks into avant-garde Sovi­et design trends.

Two Years In Northern Lands 1935

Addi­tion­al­ly, the archive gives us a broad overview of the kinds of books that were pub­lished in the Sovi­et Union dur­ing these pre-Cold War years. It’s unlike­ly many of these titles saw trans­la­tion into Eng­lish and unlike­ly many of them ever will. In some cas­es, the author and title of the book rep­re­sent­ed have been lost to his­to­ry (as with the col­or­ful cov­er sec­ond from the top). Each of the images here links to a page on the NYPL’s online data­base, where you can see pub­li­ca­tion info and down­load high-res­o­lu­tion scans. Browse, and down­load, hun­dreds more pre-War Sovi­et book cov­er designs at the NYPL’s “Scrap­book of Russ­ian Book­jack­ets, 1917–1942,” or see a few more choice selec­tions at The Paris Review, who drew our atten­tion to this won­der­ful online col­lec­tion.

Takers 1933

The Grim River 1933

M. Lermontov

Big Universe 1936

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Sovi­ets Boot­legged West­ern Pop Music on Dis­card­ed X‑Rays: Hear Orig­i­nal Audio Sam­ples

Sovi­et-Era Illus­tra­tions Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit (1976)

Watch Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Win­nie the Pooh, Cre­at­ed by the Inno­v­a­tive Ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk

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

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815 Free Art Books from World Class Museums: The Met, the Guggenheim, the Getty & LACMA

in Archives, Art, Books | January 13th, 2016

paulklee1879klee_0001

What­ev­er else Banksy’s 2010 doc­u­men­tary Exit Through the Gift Shop sug­gests about the strange rela­tion­ship between the worlds of gallery and street art, its title alone hints at a seri­ous prob­lem with the art estab­lish­ment: muse­ums are expen­sive! Unless you are in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where most of the muse­ums are free, you must not only pony up an entrance fee (or “sug­gest­ed dona­tion”), but you must also, well, exit through the gift shop, where you’ll inevitably be tempt­ed to pur­chase some tchotchkes, swag, knick-knacks, or—more like­ly for art lovers—some beau­ti­ful, over­priced book with glossy, full-page repro­duc­tions of the works you rushed past with impa­tient fam­i­ly or stood on tip­toes to glimpse over the heads of tourist crowds.

It’s true, you may some­time have the good for­tune of get­ting to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, the Get­ty, the Guggen­heim, or the LACMA on an off day, with all the time in the world to mill around and take it in. But if you’re any­thing like me, you’ll still find your­self hov­er­ing around the shelves and book tables, try­ing to con­vince your­self not to shell out upwards of $100 or more for some gor­geous cof­fee table vol­ume. (And that’s assum­ing you even get to New York or L.A. to vis­it these muse­ums at all.) Muse­um gift shop art books—whether they high­light the col­lec­tions, oth­er muse­ums, his­toric schools and move­ments, or the tech­niques and devel­op­ment of indi­vid­ual artists—are tan­ta­liz­ing objects, as are the cat­a­logs that accom­pa­ny exhi­bi­tions.

cezanne free art book

Online libraries cre­at­ed by major muse­ums have mit­i­gat­ed many of these issues of cost and dis­tance. While they won’t sub­sti­tute for the feel and smell of new books, nor proud­ly adorn your cof­fee table, hun­dreds of the vol­umes you might cov­et at the gift shop have been dig­i­tized and can be read and down­loaded for free. For exam­ple, if you head over to the Guggen­heim’s web­site, you can browse online cat­a­logs from his­toric exhibits, like that for the Paul Klee 1879–1940 exhib­it from 1967 (top). Then rum­mage through 108 free art books delv­ing into all kinds of mod­ern art.

Cezanne-in-the-Studio-by-Carol-Armstrong

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art has 456 more books to read—and to download—in their online library. You can, for exam­ple, own a copy of The Age of Car­avag­gio as a PDF on your hard dri­ve, or you can read it online, along with titles cov­er­ing every imag­in­able school, peri­od, artist, and region—“five decades of Met pub­li­ca­tions on art his­to­ry, avail­able to read, down­load, and/or search for free.”

On the oth­er side of the coun­try, we have the impres­sive Get­ty muse­um, well over 200 of whose pub­li­ca­tions you can access imme­di­ate­ly with­out leav­ing your screen at the Get­ty Pub­li­ca­tions Vir­tu­al Library. There you’ll find “free dig­i­tal back­list titles from the Get­ty Pub­li­ca­tions archive,” like Cézanne in the Stu­dio, which you can read online or down­load as a PDF.

edvardmunchlith00munc_0003

And if you hap­pen to be in Los Ange­les with time on your hands, I know you won’t deny your­self a trip to the fan­tas­tic L.A. Coun­ty Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. But whether or not you’re able to see its dizzy­ing­ly diverse col­lec­tion for your­self, or vis­it its gift shops, there’s lit­tle stop­ping you from brows­ing its online Read­ing Room, where you’ll find sev­er­al online titles free to read and down­load, like this excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion of Edvard Munch’s lith­o­graphs, etch­ings, and wood­cuts. Whether you’re a stu­dent, a schol­ar, or sim­ply a devot­ed lover of art, your life will be great­ly enhanced by the hun­dreds of books in these free online col­lec­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Down­load 448 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Read Free Dig­i­tal Art Cat­a­logues from 9 World-Class Muse­ums, Thanks to the Pio­neer­ing Get­ty Foun­da­tion

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

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

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Plato’s Cave Allegory Animated Monty Python-Style

in Animation, Philosophy | January 13th, 2016

There’s some­thing about Pla­to’s Alle­go­ry of the Cave that inspires peo­ple to get cre­ative. Orson Welles once nar­rat­ed an ani­mat­ed adap­ta­tion of the Cave alle­go­ry. The folks at Bull­head Enter­tain­ment brought to life the alle­go­ry appear­ing in Book VII of Pla­to’s Repub­lic using some fine clay­ma­tion. And Alex Gendler recent­ly craft­ed a ver­sion in an aes­thet­ic that calls Dr. Seuss to mind. Now, comes anoth­er one by The School of Life, done in a style rem­i­nis­cent of Ter­ry Gilliam’s cut-out ani­ma­tions for Mon­ty Python. It’s part of a series of 22 ani­mat­ed phi­los­o­phy videos, which takes you from the Ancients (Aris­to­tle, Pla­to, and the Sto­ics) straight through to the Mod­erns (Sartre, Camus, and Fou­cault). Find a com­plete playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Ani­ma­tions of Plato’s Alle­go­ry of the Cave: One Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles, Anoth­er Made with Clay

Ter­ry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions: A 1974 How-To Guide

What is the Good Life? Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Niet­zsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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29 Sketchbooks by Renowned Artist Richard Diebenkorn, Containing 1,045 Drawings, Now Freely Viewable Online

in Art, Stanford | January 13th, 2016

Richard Diebenkorn (U.S.A., 1922–1993), Untitled from Sketchbook #4, page 23, 1943–1993. Ink wash with pen and ink on paper. Cantor Arts Center collection, Gift of Phyllis Diebenkorn, 2014.4.25. © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

We owe the way we see Cal­i­for­nia today in part to the painter Richard Diebenko­rn, “whose deeply lyri­cal abstrac­tions evoked the shim­mer­ing light and wide-open spaces” of the state “where he spent vir­tu­al­ly his entire life.” Those words come from his 1993 New York Times obit­u­ary, which sug­gest­ed that Diebenko­rn’s resis­tance to brief aes­thet­ic move­ments and art-world fads (a resis­tance aid­ed by the dis­tance between Cal­i­for­nia and New York) would ensure that the influ­ence of his vision long sur­vive him. Now, thanks to Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty’s Can­tor Arts Cen­ter, we can look more close­ly than ever at what went into that vision in a new online exhi­bi­tion of Diebenko­rn’s sketch­books.

“Through­out his long career,” writes the Stan­ford Report’s Anna Koster, “Diebenko­rn, AB ’49, kept a sketch­book – a ‘portable stu­dio,’ as he called it – to cap­ture his ideas. These books, now in the Can­tor’s col­lec­tion, span 50 years and rep­re­sent the range of styles and sub­jects he explored, includ­ing deeply per­son­al por­traits of his wife, stud­ies of the fig­ure, land­scape stud­ies and com­po­si­tions that point to Diebenko­rn’s sig­na­ture blend of fig­u­ra­tion and abstrac­tion.” The sketch­books, donat­ed by the artist’s wid­ow and the Diebenko­rn Foun­da­tion, cur­rent­ly sit on dis­play at the Can­tor’s exhi­bi­tion Richard Diebenko­rn: The Sketch­books Revealed, which runs through August 22, 2016.

But if you can’t make it to north­ern Cal­i­for­nia before then, you can have a look at all of them online and behold in detail their 1,045 draw­ings span­ning fifty years of Diebenko­rn’s life. They give not only an insight into how he ren­dered the mate­r­i­al for so many of our Cal­i­for­nia dreams, but how he han­dled his famous­ly con­trar­i­an oscil­la­tions between styles, from Abstract Expres­sion­ism to fig­u­ra­tion and back to the abstract again, with some of his rich­est work in-between. “I was nev­er throw­ing things away when I switched from one way of paint­ing to anoth­er,” he once said. “You can see a con­tin­u­um from rep­re­sen­ta­tion to abstrac­tion, although I must say it nev­er felt like a smooth tran­si­tion while I was in the mid­dle of it.”

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

45,000 Works of Art from Stan­ford University’s Can­tor Arts Cen­ter Now Freely View­able Online

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

The Art of Liv­ing: A Free Stan­ford Course Explores Time­less Ques­tions

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Introduction to the World of Haruki Murakami Through Documentaries, Stories, Animation, Music Playlists & More

in Books, Literature | January 12th, 2016

Some of you may won­der what inspires such devo­tion among the fans of Haru­ki Muraka­mi, the world’s most inter­na­tion­al­ly pop­u­lar nov­el­ist. The rest of you — well, you’ll prob­a­bly already know that today is the man’s birth­day. Whichev­er group you fall into, you might like to use the day as an excuse to either deep­en your Muraka­mi fan­dom, or to final­ly have a look across his sin­gu­lar lit­er­ary land­scape, made up of books like A Wild Sheep Chase, Nor­we­gian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and 1Q84, with its prose at once style­less and ultra-dis­tinc­tive, its scope of ref­er­ence Japan­ese and glob­al, and the mate­r­i­al of its sto­ries thor­ough­ly strange as well as mun­dane.

Haru­ki Muraka­mi: In Search of this Elu­sive Writer, the BBC doc­u­men­tary at the top of the post, pro­vides a fine intro­duc­tion to Muraka­mi, his work, and the fans who love it. For a short­er and more impres­sion­is­tic glance into the author’s biog­ra­phy (in which the young Muraka­mi famous­ly trans­formed from a jazz bar own­er to a nov­el­ist by watch­ing a home run at a base­ball game), see psy­chol­o­gist, writer, and film­mak­er Ilana Simons’ video “About Haru­ki Muraka­mi” just above. But soon, you’ll want to have the expe­ri­ence with­out which nobody can real­ly grasp the Muraka­mi appeal: read­ing his work. The New York­er offers six of his sto­ries in their archive, read­able even by non-sub­scribers (as long as they haven’t hit their six-arti­cle-per-month pay­wall yet).

If you haven’t read any Muraka­mi before, those sto­ries may well start to give you a sense of why his fans (a group that includes no small num­ber of oth­er artists, like Pat­ti Smith) go so deep into his work. What do I mean by going deep? Not just read­ing his books over and over again — though they, or rather we, do indeed do that — but gath­er­ing togeth­er in a par­tic­u­lar Tokyo jazz cafe (we’ve even got a Muraka­mi-themed book cafe here in Seoul, where I live), putting togeth­er playlists of not just the jazz but all the oth­er music ref­er­enced in his books, writ­ing in to his advice col­umn by the thou­sands, and even doc­u­ment­ing the loca­tions in Tokyo impor­tant in both his fic­tion and his real life.

kinokuniya-books3-1024x575

Some­how, Murakami’s high­ly per­son­al work has won not just the some­times obses­sive love of its read­ers, but world­wide com­mer­cial suc­cess as well: the pub­li­ca­tion of each new nov­el comes as a near­ly hol­i­day-like event, brands like J. Press have com­mis­sioned sto­ries from him, and over in Poland they stock his books in vend­ing machines. It gets even those who don’t con­nect with his writ­ing deeply curi­ous: how does he do it? The mod­est Muraka­mi, while not espe­cial­ly giv­en to pub­lic appear­ances (though he did once give an Eng­lish-lan­guage read­ing at the 92nd Street Y), has in recent years shown more will­ing­ness to dis­cuss his process. What does it take to be like Muraka­mi? He con­sid­ers three qual­i­ties essen­tial to the work of the nov­el­ist (or to run­ning, which he took up not long after turn­ing nov­el­ist): tal­ent, focus, and endurance.

As far as the writ­ing itself, he puts it sim­ply: “I sit at my desk and focus total­ly on what I’m writ­ing. I don’t see any­thing else, I don’t think about any­thing else.” Many of his enthu­si­asts would say the same about their expe­ri­ence of read­ing his books. If all this has piqued your inter­est, don’t hes­i­tate to plunge down the well of Murakami’s real­i­ty, where, on the vin­tage jazz-sound­tracked streets, at the train sta­tions, and down the secret pas­sage­ways of Tokyo by night, you’ll meet talk­ing cats, pre­co­cious teenagers, and mys­te­ri­ous women (and their ears), dis­cov­er par­al­lel worlds — and ulti­mate­ly become quite good at Muraka­mi bin­go.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 6 Sto­ries By Haru­ki Muraka­mi Free Online

Pat­ti Smith Reviews Haru­ki Murakami’s New Nov­el, Col­or­less Tsuku­ru Taza­ki and His Years of Pil­grim­age

Dis­cov­er Haru­ki Murakami’s Adver­to­r­i­al Short Sto­ries: Rare Short-Short Fic­tion from the 1980s

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Pub­lish­es His Answers to 3,700 Ques­tions from Fans in a New Japan­ese eBook

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Reads in Eng­lish from The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle in a Rare Pub­lic Read­ing (1998)

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Read Online Haru­ki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Base­ball Game Launched His Writ­ing Career

A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Japan’s Jazz and Base­ball-Lov­ing Post­mod­ern Nov­el­ist

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Nov­els Sold in Pol­ish Vend­ing Machines

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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David Bowie Performs an Ethereal Version of “Heroes,” with a Bottle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keeping the Beat

in Music | January 12th, 2016

Months ago, I stum­bled upon this pret­ty won­der­ful video of David Bowie play­ing an “acoustic” ver­sion of “Heroes,” one of my favorite songs, and I thought I’d quick­ly share it today. Why wait?

Appear­ing at Neil Young’s annu­al Bridge School Ben­e­fit con­cert in Octo­ber 1996, Bowie gives us a stripped-down ver­sion of the mov­ing song he co-wrote with Bri­an Eno in 1977. Flanked by Reeves Gabrels on gui­tar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass, Bowie strums his acoustic gui­tar. All the while, he taps his foot, let­ting a bot­tle cap, taped to shoe, assist in cre­at­ing a per­cus­sive beat. It’s all kept ele­gant­ly sim­ple. Hope you enjoy.

Dona­tions to The Bridge School, which helps phys­i­cal­ly chal­lenged chil­dren over­come their impair­ments via the use of tech­nol­o­gy, can be made here.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

50 Years of Chang­ing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Ani­mat­ed GIF

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Bowie Becomes a DJ on BBC Radio in 1979; Intro­duces Lis­ten­ers to The Vel­vet Under­ground, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

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All of Bach is Putting Bach’s Complete Works Online: 253 Done, 827 to Come

in Music | January 12th, 2016

Mem­o­rably syn­the­sized by Wendy Car­los (and mem­o­rably beloved by A Clock­work Orange’s Alex DeLarge), J.S. Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos epit­o­mize the play­ful verve of so much Baroque music. The Con­cer­tos “dis­play the lighter side of Bach’s imper­ish­able genius,” writes NPR; “few musi­cal works are as loved—and as often per­formed” as the six spright­ly instru­men­tal pieces. And of those six works, the fourth, Con­cer­to in G major, is per­haps the most beloved, and most rec­og­niz­able, of all. Thus it makes a fit­ting ear­ly entry in the expand­ing archive that is (or will be) All of Bach, a site intend­ing to fea­ture live per­for­mances of all 1080 of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s works, per­formed by the Nether­lands Bach Soci­ety. We’ve drawn your atten­tion to the admirable effort before, and we hap­pi­ly do so again to cel­e­brate their 150th offer­ing, a per­for­mance of Was Gott tut, das ist wohlge­tan (see a short, cel­e­bra­to­ry video announce­ment below).

The last time we checked in with All of Bach back in April, the site had uploaded only 53 per­for­mances. Since that time, they’ve added oth­er pop­u­lar favorites like The Well-Tem­pered Clavier (a “mael­strom in a minor key”—also beau­ti­ful­ly adapt­ed to the Moog by Wendy Car­los), and the glo­ri­ous Mag­ni­fi­cat, Bach’s first large choral work after his 1723 appoint­ment in Leipzig (hear “Depo­suit” below).

The Con­cer­to in G major, which you can see and hear per­formed at the top of the post, shows us the com­pos­er “con­tin­u­al­ly mis­lead­ing us” as to “which instru­ments are the real soloists.” Two recorders ini­tial­ly take the lead, then a vio­lin, then the recorders again until “they are soon trumped by the vio­lin, which steals the show in a whirl­wind of dizzy­ing notes…. The roles are always ambigu­ous,” and our atten­tion always riv­et­ed on the vir­tu­oso inter­play. “Bach delib­er­ate­ly obscures the usu­al­ly clear con­trast between soloists and ensem­ble,” All of Bach observes, and “his play on the char­ac­ter­is­tic ele­ments of the con­cer­to form draws to a close in a suit­ably sub­ver­sive and bound­ary-blur­ring way.”

The site also fea­tures extras such as inter­views with musi­cians. (See Harp­si­chordist Fred­er­ick Haas dis­cuss The Well-Tem­pered Clavier here, or watch vio­lin­ist Shunske Sato and recorder play­er Heiko ter Shegget talk about the Con­cer­to in G major’s com­plex­i­ty here.) You’ll also find plen­ty of his­tor­i­cal and musi­co­log­i­cal con­text for each piece. New per­for­mances are uploaded to the site every Fri­day. To keep up with All of Bach, fol­low them on Face­book or Twit­ter, or sign up for email updates on their site. Or just vis­it their web site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All of Bach Is Putting Videos of 1,080 Bach Per­for­mances Online: Watch the First 53 Record­ings and the St. Matthew Pas­sion

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

JS Bach’s The Well-Tem­pered Clavier Artis­ti­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed with Puls­ing Neon Lights

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

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David Bowie Gives Graduation Speech At Berklee College of Music: “Music Has Been My Doorway of Perception” (1999)

in Life, Music | January 11th, 2016

I have lit­tle to add to the tidal wave of remem­brances and trib­utes in the wake of David Bowie’s death. Seems near­ly every­one has a sto­ry about how his music, his per­sis­tence, his gen­eros­i­ty, his genius, his unabashed weird­ness changed their lives. What he taught me as a young teenag­er was that the phrase “just be your­self” can just as well mean “be who­ev­er you can dream up,” and damn the pre­de­ter­mined roles and mean­ing­less stig­ma. Hard­er than it sounds, but Bowie pulled it off like no one before or since.

Bowie was, writes Sara Ben­in­casa, the “patron saint of… weirdos of all stripes, and that most dan­ger­ous crea­ture of all: the artist.” He did not shy away from pre­tense; he embraced it as his spe­cial méti­er. In 1999, Bowie deliv­ered the com­mence­ment address at Boston’s Berklee Col­lege of Music, where he received an hon­orary doc­tor­ate along with Wayne Short­er. In his speech, he says, he learned ear­ly on that “authen­tic­i­ty and the nat­ur­al form of expres­sion wasn’t going to be my forte.”

In fact, what I found that I was good at doing, and what I real­ly enjoyed the most, was the game of “what if?” What if you com­bined Brecht-Weill musi­cal dra­ma with rhythm and blues? What hap­pens if you trans­plant the French chan­son with the Philly sound? Will Schoen­berg lie com­fort­ably with Lit­tle Richard? Can you put hag­gis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well.

Thus began his exper­i­ments with iden­ti­ty that first took shape in the fan­tas­tic crea­ture, Zig­gy Star­dust, his “cru­sade,” as he calls it, “to change the kind of infor­ma­tion that rock music con­tained.” Speak­ing of Zig­gy, Bowie tells a sto­ry about play­ing “grot­ty… workingman’s clubs” in “full, bat­tle fin­ery of Tokyo-space­boy and a pair of shoes high enough that it induced nose bleeds.”

Informed by the pro­mot­er at one such bar that the only bath­room was a filthy sink at the end of the hall, Bowie balked. “Lis­ten son,” said the pro­mot­er, “If its good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you.” From this expe­ri­ence, he says, he learned that “mix­ing ele­ments of bad taste with good would often pro­duce the most inter­est­ing results.”

The speech is packed with wit­ty anec­dotes like this and self-dep­re­cat­ing asides. Most of the sto­ries, as you can hear in the video excerpt at the top of the post, are about Bowie’s “great­est men­tor,” John Lennon. Lennon, says Bowie, “defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fab­ric of pop and imbue it with ele­ments from oth­er art­forms, often pro­duc­ing some­thing extreme­ly beau­ti­ful, very pow­er­ful and imbued with strange­ness.” Indulging his love for high and low cul­ture, Bowie under­cuts his ele­vat­ed talk of art-pop by describ­ing his and Lennon’s con­ver­sa­tions as “Beav­is and Butthead on ‘Cross­fire.’”

Bowie ends his speech with a heart­felt, and dare I say, authen­tic sum­ma­ry of his life in music. His only piece of advice, writes Boston.com: he urges the Berklee grad­u­ates to “pur­sue their musi­cal pas­sion as if it were a sick­ness.”

Music has giv­en me over 40 years of extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more trag­ic episodes have been dimin­ished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of com­pan­ion­ship when I’ve been lone­ly and a sub­lime means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion when I want­ed to touch peo­ple. It’s been both my door­way of per­cep­tion and the house that I live in.

I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it gra­cious­ly offered me. Thank you very much and remem­ber, if it itch­es, play it.

Read the full tran­script of the speech here, or below the jump:

(more…)

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