Arts and Culture

Since Radiohead’s last release, A Moon-Shaped Pool , members of the band have been absorbed in other projects. They’ve turned their band’s website into an archive for their discography and a library for rarities and ephemera — sending not-so-subtle signals their time together has reached a natural end, even if drummer Phil Selway said in 2020 “there are always conversations going on…. We’ll see. We’re talking.” Two of the band’s most prominent members, guitarist Jonny Greenwood and frontman Thom Yorke, devoted their talents to film scores, a medium Greenwood has explored for many years: in the theatrical violence of There Will Be Blood , for example, the horrific aftermath of We Need to Talk about Kevin , and the almost balletic bloodiness of You Were Never Here . Yorke, meanwhile, scored Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria , a film in which ballet dancers’ bodies are broken and bloodied by black magic. Greenwood, Yorke and company excel at conjuring atmosp...

“It really had very little to do with combining a bunch of famous people,” says Tom Petty about the Traveling Wilburys. “It was a bunch of friends that just happened to be really good at making music.” One of the most modest supergroups of the 20th century, one that fate and chance threw together for a very brief period, the Traveling Wilburys made music that sits outside the usual histories of 1980s music, featuring five men in different states of their careers. Tom Petty was about to have a comeback, George Harrison had just had one, Jeff Lynne was no longer having chart hits as ELO, but he was shaping the sound of the late 1980s as a producer, Roy Orbison was *about* to have a posthumous comeback, and Bob Dylan was…doing whatever Dylan does—every album he put out in the ‘80s had an equal number of detractors and comeback claimants. Put it this way: the Traveling Wilburys didn’t feel like a nostalgia act, and neither did it feel like a marketing idea. It was actually lightnin...

“One of the biggest considerations when traveling to Japan is its inscrutable language,” writes Designboom’s Juliana Neira . But then, one might also consider making that language more scrutable — and making one’s experience in Japan much richer — by learning some of it. Kanji , the Chinese characters used in the written Japanese language, may at first look like small, often bewilderingly complex pictures, and many assume they visually evoke the meanings they express. In fact, to use the linguistic terms, they’re not pictograms, representations of thoughts or ideas, but logograms, representations of words or parts of words. Resemble miniature works of art though they often do, kanji aren’t entirely unsystematic. This helps beginning learners get a handle on the first and most essential characters of the thousands they’ll eventually need to know. So does the fact that some of them, in origin, really are pictographic — that is, they look like the meaning of the word they represent —...

You never know what the YouTube recommendation algorithm will serve up next. Above, we have Journey’s road crew performing “Separate Ways” as part of a concert soundcheck. And it turns out the crew has some real chops. At least according to the YouTube comments, the crew/band features Scott Appleton on guitar. (In recent years, he has served as the guitar tech for Rush’s Alex Lifeson.) And on drums, we seemingly have Jim Handley, a Nashville-based drummer who performs in the Journey tribute band, Resurrection . The actual performance starts around the 30 second mark. Enjoy. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please 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. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook  and   Twitter  and  sharing intelligent media with your friends. O...

There was a time when cinephile shorthand consisted mostly of quotations from movies — from movies’ dialogue, to be precise. The distinction matters these days, now that the internet has enabled us to communicate just as easily with visual quotations as verbal ones. While some of us go the extra mile by manually combing through our film collections and taking the screenshots that best reflect our personal sentiments, most of us have long relied on the results, however approximate, served up by search engines like Google Images. Now a promising new solution has emerged, called Flim (not to be confused with “film”). Described on its about page as “a constantly evolving database of HD screenshots,” with a claim of 50,000 provided daily, Flim uses artificial intelligence to perform color analysis and detect “objects, clothes, characters, etc .” This means that when you enter terms like “tree,”  “guitar,”   “tuxedo,” or “pizza,” you get a selection of images includin...

The Belgian painter René Magritte created some of the most enigmatic and iconic works in Surrealist art. But before he moved to Paris in 1927 and began forging relationships with André Breton and the Surrealists , Magritte struggled in Brussels as a freelance commercial artist, creating advertisements in the Art Deco style. In 1924 Magritte began designing posters and advertisements for the couturier Honorine “Norine” Deschrijver and her husband Paul-Gustave Van Hecke, owners of the Belgian fashion company Norine. Van Hecke also owned art galleries, and was an early champion of surrealism. Van Hecke would eventually pay Magritte a stipend in exchange for the right to market his surrealist works. In the 1924 advertising poster above, Magritte portrays a woman in high heels pretending to be  Lord Lister , the gentleman thief from German pulp fiction, wearing “an afternoon coat created by Norine.” Magritte designed some 40 sheet music covers, most of them in the Art Deco st...