Arts and Culture

Three men feast on free lunch in a drawing by Charles Dana Gibson In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons , beer-swilling Homer falls in love with a sandwich. He spends his days nibbling away at the “sickening, festering remains of a 10-foot hoagie,” Nathan Rabin writes , “long after decency, self-respect, and survival would all seem to dictate throwing it out.” The sandwich may be yet another instance of the show pulling some obscure detail from American history for comic effect — or maybe writer David M. Stern read Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh , in which the playwright describes “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese.” O’Neill’s sandwich is so historical, it has a name, the Raines Sandwich, named after New York State Senator John Raines, the author of an 1896 law that raised the cost of liquor licenses substantially, upped the drinking age from sixteen to eighteen, and banned alcoholic beverages on Sundays except in large hotels and lo...

In the summer of 1981, the British band Queen was recording tracks for their tenth studio album, Hot Space , at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. As it happened, David Bowie had scheduled time at the same studio to record the title song for the movie Cat People . Before long, Bowie stopped by the Queen sessions and joined in. The original idea was that he would add backup vocals on the song “Cool Cat.” “David came in one night and we were playing other people’s songs for fun, just jamming,” says Queen drummer Roger Taylor in Mark Blake’s book Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Freddie Mercury and Queen . “In the end, David said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?'” And so began a marathon session of nearly 24-hours–fueled, according to Blake, by wine and cocaine. Built around John Deacon’s distinctive bass line, the song was mostly written by Mercury and Bowie. Blake describes the scene, beginning with the recollections of Queen’s guitarist: ‘...

Some of the most influential directors of the French New Wave, like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Éric Rohmer, first stepped into the world of film as critics. They found their voices by publishing in the Paris cinephile institution of Cahiers du cinéma ; a few decades later, Quentin Tarantino found his own by working at the Manhattan Beach cinephile institution of Video Archives. Stories of all the myriad ways in which he would express his enthusiasm for and expertise on cinema there have passed into legend. But just like the critics Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer, the video-store clerk Tarantino ultimately seems to have signed on to the old proposition that the best response to a work of art is another work of art. Tarantino’s endorsements of and introductions to the work of other directors (for example, the one he recorded for Wong Kar-wai’s  Chungking Express ) have given us a sense of his cinematic taste. So, in an even more telling manner, do the elements he s...

Traditional Japanese carpentry impresses us today, not so much with the tools its practitioners use as with the ones they don’t: nails, for example. Or glue, for that matter. Here on Open Culture we’ve previously featured introductions to Japanese wood joinery , the art of cutting wood in a manner such that pieces slide together and solidly interlock without the aid of any other materials. Though it may seem like magic, it’s really just physics — or rather, physics, and engineering, and the branches of biology relevant to growing the right wood. For the traditional Japanese carpenter himself, it all comes down to extensive training and practice. Traditional Japanese carpentry need not even be done in Japan. Take Miya Shoji, the New York City shop profiled in the China Uncensored video above . Under current owner Hisao Hanafusa, who came to the United States in 1963, it makes and sells furniture crafted using canonical techniques, but in service of particular pieces quite un...

Few symphonies are as well-known as Beethoven’s Ninth, an assertion supported by the fact that it’s no doubt playing in your head even as you read this. Few symphonies are less well-known — at least by Beethoven’s standards — than his Tenth, primarily because he never actually got the thing finished. He did make a start on it, however, and at his death in 1827 left behind notes and drafts composed alongside the Ninth, which had also been commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society. Such is Beethoven’s stature that his enthusiasts have been speculating ever since on what his incomplete symphony would sound like if completed, employing any techniques to do so that their time put at hand. “In 1988, musicologist Barry Cooper ventured to complete the first and second movements,” writes Rutgers University Art & AI Lab director Ahmed Elgammal at The Conversation . “He wove together 250 bars of music from the sketches to create what was, in his view, a production of the first mo...

Gorgeously illustrated cookbooks featuring sumptuous images of fancy desserts and other special occasion food can be quite an  intimidating proposition to self-doubting beginners . The recipes themselves are daunting, and as every  Great British Baking Show  viewer learns, watching the top contestants squirm in advance of co-host  Paul Hollywood ‘s icy judgment, flavor can’t save an edible creation that fails as art. Andy Warhol’s approach to cookery appears rather more blithe. His 1959 cookbook,  Wild Raspberries  — the title is a play on Ingmar Bergman’s  Wild Strawberries  — displays little interest in its readers’ cooking ability… or, for that matter, its authors. Fanciful representations of such delicacies as  Gardoons a la Mousseline  are pretty as a picture… and stress free given that no one is actually expected to make them. Wild Raspberries  is all about attitude… and ambition of a purely social nature. Warhol’s co-...

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