Nominees of the 1999 MTV Movie Awards included Adam Sandler, Liv Tyler, Chris Tucker, and Jennifer Love Hewitt to mention just a few of the names in a veritable who’s-who of turn-of-the-millennium American pop culture. But for the teenage cinephiles watching that night, the highl … | Continue reading
Public recognition is an all too rare reward for many artists, but it carries with it a risk of being widely misunderstood. Georgia O’Keeffe gained renown for her large-scale flower paintings in the 1920s, selling six images of calla lilies for $25,000. Her husband Alfred Stiegli … | Continue reading
We don’t hear the phrase “very rich hours” as much as we used to, back when it was occasionally employed in the headlines of magazine articles or the titles of novels. Today, it’s much to be doubted whether even one in a hundred thousand of us could begin to identify its referent … | Continue reading
If you attended a seder this month, you no doubt read aloud from the Haggadah, a Passover tradition in which everyone at the table takes turns recounting the story of Exodus. There’s no definitive edition of the Haggadah. Every Passover host is free to choose the version of the f … | Continue reading
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War … | Continue reading
In 1955, the United States was entering the final stages of McCarthyism or the Second Red Scare. During this low point in American history, the US government looked high and low for Communist spies. Entertainers, educators, government employees and union members were often viewed … | Continue reading
Here in the twenty-first century, many of us around the world think of Japan as essentially unchanging. We do so not without cause, given how much of what goes on there, including the operation of certain businesses, has been going on for centuries and centuries. But the politica … | Continue reading
Before Foo Fighters, before Nirvana, before even Dain Bramage, Scream and other bands, Dave Grohl played in the Springfield, Virginia punk band Mission Impossible. Above, we have footage of Grohl, only 16 years old, giving us a preview of performances to come. The camera puts Gro … | Continue reading
That vast repository of American history that is the Smithsonian Institution evolved from an organization founded in 1816 called the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. Its mandate, the collection and dissemination of useful knowledge, now sounds very much … | Continue reading
Italy is widely celebrated for having vigilantly preserved its food culture, with the result that many dishes there are still prepared in more or less the same way they have been for centuries. When you taste Italian food at its best, you taste history — to borrow the name of a Y … | Continue reading
Note: Yesterday, Mad Magazine legend Al Jaffee died at the age of 102. Below, we present our 2016 post featuring Jaffee talking about how he invented the iconic Fold-ins for the satirical magazine. Keep copying those Sunday funnies, kids, and one day you may beat Al Jaffee’s reco … | Continue reading
Think of the names David Hockney, Jean Michel-Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring, and one time period comes vividly to mind: the nineteen-eighties, the blast radius of whose explosion of shape, color, and motion encompassed everything from mainstream pop culture to the … | Continue reading
I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. – Leonora Carrington In some ways, Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s story is a familiar one, given her gender and generation. A creative young woman, stifled by her conv … | Continue reading
“I’ve been a painter all my life. I’ve been a musician most of my life. If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words.” – Joni Mitchell There’s been a lot of love for Joni Mitchell circulating of late, the sort of heartfelt outpouring that typically accompanies news of … | Continue reading
Evan Puschak, better known as Youtube’s Nerdwriter, has created video essays on a host of visual artists from Goya to Picasso, de Chirico to Hopper, Leonardo to Van Gogh. And though he narrates all his analyses of their work with evident enthusiasm, one sooner or later comes to s … | Continue reading
Image by Paul du Châtellier, via Wikimedia Commons In 1900, the French prehistorian Paul du Châtellier dug up from a burial ground a fairly sizable stone, broken but covered with engraved markings. Even after he put it back together, neither he nor anyone else could work out what … | Continue reading
Above, we present an important document from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: John Coltrane’s handwritten outline of his groundbreaking jazz composition, A Love Supreme. Recorded in December of 1964 and released in 1965, A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s personal … | Continue reading
If you had to choose a living cultural figure to represent nineteen-seventies America, you could do much worse than Burt Sugarman. He made his name as a television impresario with The Midnight Special, which put on NBC’s airwaves performances by everyone from ABBA to AC/DC, REO S … | Continue reading
James Hoffmann knows something about coffee. He’s authored The World Atlas of Coffee and runs a prolific YouTube channel, where he covers everything from making coffee with the AeroPress and MokaPot, to brewing the perfect espresso and also providing basic coffee making tips & tr … | Continue reading
It’s easy to see why kumihimo, the ancient Japanese art of silk braiding, is described as a meditative act. The weaver achieves an intricate design by getting into a rhythmic groove, overlapping hand-dyed silken threads on a circular or rectangle wooden loom, from which up to 50 … | Continue reading
Life imitates art, and by art, I mean, of course, The Simpsons. More than thirty years ago, the show took on the issue of censorship with a story in which Marge Simpson launches an impassioned campaign against cartoon violence, only to find herself on the other side of the fence … | Continue reading
Ryuichi Sakamoto was born and raised in Japan. He rose to prominence as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the most influential Japanese band in pop-music history. Last week, he died in Japan. But he also claimed not to consider himself Japanese. That reflects the dedication of … | Continue reading
As Helen Reddy sang in the 70s: You live your life in the songs you hear On the rock n’ roll radio… The 80s ushered in a new era, leaving the music industry forever changed, though the songs themselves retained their power to speak to us on a deeply personal level. In 1979, the E … | Continue reading
Wes Anderson has been making feature films for 27 years now, and in that time his work has grown more temporally and geographically specific. Though shot in his native Texas in the late nineteen-nineties, his breakout picture Rushmore seemed to take place in no one part of the Un … | Continue reading
The denial of science suffuses American society, and no matter what the data says, some conservative forces refuse efforts to curtail, or even study, climate change. Astrophysicist Katie Mack calls this retrenchment a form of “data nihilism,” writing in an exasperated tweet, “Wha … | Continue reading
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in … | Continue reading
Let me quote myself: “From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released Everything is a Remix, a four-part series that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, draw on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these material … | Continue reading
A heads up for Open Culture readers: This spring, Stanford Continuing Studies has a rich lineup of online courses, and they’re offering a special 15% discount to our readers. Just use the promo code CULTURE during checkout. Serving lifelong learners everywhere, Stanford Continuin … | Continue reading
“Enable subtitles,” says the notification that appears before The Poor Man of Nippur — and you will need them, unless, of course, you happen to hail from the cradle of civilization. The short film is adapted from “a folktale based on a 2,700-year-old poem about a pauper,” says th … | Continue reading
When you picture modern day Tokyo, what comes to mind? The electronic billboards of Shibuya and Shinjuku? The teeming streets? The maid cafes? The robot hotel? A 97 square foot micro apartment? Bernard Guerrini‘s documentary Naturopolis – Tokyo, from megalopolis to garden-city de … | Continue reading
It doesn’t take long to learn how to pull a shot of espresso. Search for that phrase on Youtube, and you’ll find hours’ worth of sound instruction, most of it in the form of brief and easily digestible videos. All of them cover the same basic stages of the process: grinding, dosi … | Continue reading
Creative Commons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin Long ago, in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was the dominant language. And, for centuries, it remained the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was gradually squeezed out by Aramaic, and it fad … | Continue reading
In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century there lived a mechanically inclined polymath named Badi’ al-Zaman Abu-‘l-‘Izz Ibn Isma’il Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, whom we might prefer simply to call Al-Jazari. A resident of Diyar-Bakir, in modern-day Turkey, he was employed as a … | Continue reading
Pulp Fiction will likely hold up generations from now, but the resonance of its title may already be lost to history. Pulp magazines, or “the pulps,” as they were called, once held special significance for lovers of adventure stories, detective and science fiction, and horror and … | Continue reading
Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, a bit early to be subjected to the kinds of DNA analysis that have become so prevalent today. Luckily, the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century still adhered to the custom of saving locks of hair from the deceased — particularly … | Continue reading
CBGB is a state of mind – Patti Smith All good things must come to an end, but it hurt when CBGB’s, New York City’s celebrated – and famously filthy – music club shuttered for good on October 15th, 2006, a victim of skyrocketing Lower East Side rents. While plenty of punk and New … | Continue reading
Nearly a century after Claude Monet painted them, the Nymphéas, or Water Lilies, still impress as a vision of a seemingly minor subject realized at a grand scale. The paintings installed in a dedicated room at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris make an especially strong impact on … | Continue reading
In the early 1950s, archaeologists unearthed several clay tablets from the 14th century BCE. Found, WFMU tells us, “in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit,” these tablets “contained cuneiform signs in the hurrian language,” which turned out to be the oldest known piece of music eve … | Continue reading
Before the Industrial Revolution, few had occasion to consider the impact of technology on their lives. A few decades in, however, certain segments of society thought about little else. That, in any case, is the impression given by the debate over what the English press of the ea … | Continue reading
Above, Snarky Puppy drummer Larnell Lewis explains drumming in 13 levels of difficulty, from easy to complex, showing how “drum techniques build upon each other as the easiest levels incorporate the hi-hat, bass and snare drums, and more difficult levels include polyrhythms, the … | Continue reading
No French film of this century is more beloved than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Or rather, no protagonist of a French film in this century is more beloved than Audrey Tautou’s eponymous Amélie. Hence, no doubt, why the movie is best known by that short version of its title rathe … | Continue reading
Extreme weather conditions have become a topic of grave concern. Are floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and catastrophic storms the new normal? Just for a moment, let’s travel to a place where extreme weather has always been the norm: Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela. Accordi … | Continue reading
If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilup … | Continue reading
First released in 1984, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed concert film Stop Making Sense featured the Talking Heads at the height of their creative and musical powers. The film starts with David Byrne, alone on a bare stage, with a boombox and his big white suit, performing “Psycho Kill … | Continue reading
Released 40 years ago this week, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (hear the original EP version here) became, according to the BBC, “a crucial link between Seventies disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eighties.” If you frequented a dance club during the 1980s … | Continue reading
Barnaby Dixon‘s incredible two-piece creations redefine the notion of hand puppets, by moving and responding in highly nuanced, realistic ways. The pinkie and index finger of one hand slip into the creature’s arms, leaving the thumb free to operate the tiny controls that tilt hea … | Continue reading
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring hotel in the mountains of Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, has been in business for over 1,300 years, more than five times as long as the United States has existed. Nevertheless, it feels considerably more modern than the average American motel … | Continue reading
The documentary filmmaker and sports editor Paul Devlin has won five Emmy awards, but he may well be better known for not getting into Harvard — or rather, for not getting into Harvard, then rejecting Harvard’s rejection. “I noticed that the rejection letter I received from Harva … | Continue reading