Arts and Culture

30 years after its original release, The Cure performed the entirety of their 1989 album  Disintegration at a concert held this past Thursday at The Sydney Opera House.  Disintegration  remains the band's best-selling album to date, and it now ranks #326 on Rolling Stone's  list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time."  You can watch the show, from start to finish, above. Find a setlist, with timestamps, below. 17:15 Delirious Night 23:44 Fear of Ghosts 30:45 No Heart 34:20 Esten 38:17 2 Late 41:10 Out of Mind 44:46 Babble 54:42 Plainsong 59:25 Pictures of You 1:06:44 Closedown 1:11:00 Lovesong 1:14:40 Last Dance 1:19:52 Lullaby 1:24:46 Fascination Street 1:29:47 Prayers for Rain 1:35:34 The Same Deep Water as You 1:44:47 Disintegration 1:53:11 Homesick 2:00:16 Untitled 2:10:55 Burn @? 2:17:52 Three Imaginary Boys 2:21:30 Pirate Ships via Laughing Squid Would you like to support the mission of Open Cult...

As any enthusiast of Godzilla movies knows, nobody does monsters quite like the Japanese. The cultural tradition of giant creatures laying waste to cities is known as  kaij? ,  a combination of  kai (?), "strange," and  j?  (?), "beast." The well of  kaij?   goes deep, but the well of Japanese monsterhood itself goes much deeper. Take y?kai , the category of monsters, spirits, and demons whose history goes all the way back to the first century. But it wasn't until the medieval era that depictions of  y?kai   —whose name combines the characters  y? (?), with its connotations of attraction, bewitchment, and calamity, and  kai (?), which can indicate something suspicious, a mystery, or an apparition — turned into popular entertainment. Most  y?kai  possess supernatural powers, sometimes used for good but often not so much. Some look human, while others, such as the turtle-like kappa  and the intellig...

Mexican cuisine is as time-consuming as it is delicious. Frida Kahlo fans attracted to the idea of duplicating some dishes from the banquet served at her wedding to fellow artist Diego Rivera should set aside ample time, so as to truly enjoy the experience of making chiles rellenos and nopales salad from scratch. Sarah Urist Green ’s Kahlo-themed cooking lesson, above, adapted from Marie-Pierre Colle and Frida’s stepdaughter Guadalupe Rivera’s 1994 cookbook Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo , is refreshingly frank about the challenges of tackling these types of dishes, especially for those of us whose grandmas ran more toward Jell-O salad. Her self-deprecation should go a long way toward reassuring less-skilled cooks that perfection is not the goal. As she told Nuvo’s Dan Grossman: The art cooking videos are immensely fun to make… And what I’m trying to do is reach people who aren’t necessarily outwardly into art or don’t know whether the...

Gregorian chants became a thing very briefly in the early 1990s, when German electronic group Enigma combined them with the Soul II Soul “Keep On Movin’” drum loop and that everpresent shakuhachi sample for “Sadness Part One”. And then that song was *everywhere* for the first half of the 90s, giving rise to chillout music like the Orb and The Future Sound of London. Gregorian music faded away as a trend in dance music, but it’s never really gone away. Bolstered by some claims that the soothing voices help increase alpha waves in the brain, groups like Gregorian (created by Enigma’s Frank Peterson) set about arranging pop songs in the Gregorian style, starting in 1999. Others have followed suit, or should I say followed cowl (such as Auscultate, which created the Queen cover below). But Gregorian (the group) is the king of them all, and Petersen’s project has gone on to sell over 5.5 million albums. Corny or not, the project is immensely popular w...

Behind the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature, there are stories upon stories, some as juicy as those in the work of winners like William Faulkner or Gabriel García Márquez—and some just as devastating to the parties involved. Last year’s award was postponed after sexual assault allegations lead to several members to resigning. (There will be two prizes awarded for 2019.) The charges needed to be aired, but if you’re looking for details about how the secretive committee selects the nominees and winners, you’ll have to wait a while. “The Swedish Academy keeps all information about nominations and selections for the prestigious award secret for 50 years,” writes Allison Flood at The Guardian . Newly unsealed documents from the Academy have shone light on Jean-Paul Sartre’s rejection of the prize in 1964, and the shunning of Samuel Beckett in 1968 by committee chairman Anders Österling, who found his work too nihilistic (Beckett won the following year), and of Vladimir Nabokov,...

All of us here in the 2010s have, at one time or another, been street photographers. But up until 1838, nobody had ever been a street photographer. In that year when camera phones were well beyond even the ken of science fiction , Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype process and one of the fathers of photography itself, took the first photo of a human being . In so doing he also became the first street photographer, capturing as his picture did not just a human being but the urban environment inhabited by that human being, in this case Paris' Boulevard du Temple. Daguerre's picture begins the historical journey through 181 years of street photography, one street photo per year all soundtracked with period-appropriate songs, in the video above . From the dawn of the practice, street photography (unlike smile-free early photographic portraiture ) has shown life as it's actually lived. Like the lone Parisian who happened to be standing still long enoug...