78 Great Directors Who Shaped the History of Cinema: An Introduction

in Film | October 15th, 2025

When first we take an interest in movies, we must figure out our own method of deciding what to watch next. The central factor may be box office performance, the presence of a favorite performer, adherence to a favorite genre, or the use of a familiar story from other media. Such paths through cinema can lead to entertaining viewing experiences, no doubt, but it’s safe to say that very few movie-lovers become bona fide cinephiles without eventually switching their allegiance to directors. In eras past, a properly organized video store — that is, one whose tapes, Laserdiscs, or DVDs were ordered alphabetically, by the director’s name — could provide a gateway. (Mine was Scarecrow Video.) Today’s budding cinephiles have YouTube channels like The House of Tabula.

Formerly known as The Cinema Cartography (and before that as Channel Criswell), The House of Tabula has produced many video essays on film previously featured on Open Culture. More than a few closely examine particular directors: Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino, to name just four that appear in The House of Tabula’s new three-and-a-half-hour video “The Masters of Cinema.”

A journey through the evolution of film as reflected in the work of 78 different directors, it covers Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Lynch, and Tarantino in its later chapters on “the Modern Masters” and “the New School.” The earlier chapters examine pictures by everyone from Georges Méliès, Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin to Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, and Orson Welles.

This view of cinema subscribes to “auteur theory,” which holds the director to be the guiding artistic intelligence, or “author,” of a film. Most of us accept at least a version of this idea relatively early in our journey into cinephilia, and soon thereafter encounter the varieties of objection to it that have been lodged for decades and decades. Some directors may operate their own cameras, but most don’t; a few directors act in their own movies, but the vast majority wouldn’t even consider it (which is probably all to the good). With some notable exceptions, cinema is an intensely collaborative art, but as House of Tabula co-creator Lewis Bond puts it, the director is still the “voice” of a film. Together, the voices of the auteur filmmakers like the ones featured in this video define the language of cinema, or perhaps the language that is cinema — one that every cinephile spends a lifetime learning to understand.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

in History, Religion | October 15th, 2025

Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, at least according to a statistic often cited in recent years. But what, exactly, comes to their minds — or those of any other believers around the world — when they imagine one? Personal conceptions may vary, of course, but we can be fairly certain of one thing: most of them will bear no resemblance to the angels actually described in the Bible. Here to give us a sense of their appearance is Tommie Trelawny, creator of the YouTube channel Hochelaga, whose video above explains “Why Bible Accurate Angels Are So Creepy.”

Far from the winged, white-robed embodiments of gentleness we might know from greeting cards, says Trelawny, the angels of the Bible, and specifically the Old Testament, are “horrifying abominations” who would be more at home in an H. P. Lovecraft novel. Angel, from the Greek angelos, which itself comes from the Hebrew mal’akh, means “messenger.” That implies an innocuous-enough set of duties, but then, you may recall the story of Passover, with its angel who slaughtered the Egyptians’ first-born sons; or the angel who “struck 70,000 Israelites to death”; or the angel who “singlehandedly killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night.”

The Bible doesn’t say anything about those angels having wings. “In fact, they look like any ordinary person,” as do even the most famous examples like Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. In the grand heavenly scheme of things, such humanoid angels, or Malakh, don’t rank particularly high. Still, they’re one rung above the Cherubim, who turn out to be less like Cupid and more like “the mythical beasts of ancient Mesopotamia, especially the Babylonian Lamassu, which has the wings of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the head of a king” — with a more-than-passing resemblance to the Egyptian sphinx or the Hittite griffin. Even the popular image of the pudgy, flying cherub, which emerged much later, seems to have been imported from Greek and Roman myths.

Ranked above the Malakh are the six-winged Seraphim, or “burning ones.” The origins of these “caretakers of God’s throne” are suggested by the Hebrew word Saraph, meaning “a venomous serpent in the desert,” much like the cobra whose image adorned the head of the Egyptian pharaoh. As for the Ophanim, it’s anyone’s guess where they come from. Taking the form of a wheel within a wheel floating in the sky, its rims lined with eyes, an Ophan would make for an intimidating sight indeed: perhaps a representation of the wheels of God’s chariot, perhaps the result of “the prophet ingesting a psychedelic plant,” and perhaps — according to a fringe theory — visitation by a spacecraft. Whatever the evidence for those explanations, it’s safe to say they’re not quite as comforting as all those placid celestial harpists.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like

in History, Language | October 14th, 2025

As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or otherwise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preoccupations….

So it is with the study of ancient languages, but since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.

To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Marc Maron Wraps Up the WTF Podcast: Watch His Final Interview with Barack Obama

in Life, Podcasts | October 14th, 2025

Back in 2015, President Obama joined Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, marking the first time a sitting president took part in this new kind of broadcasting format. It was a watershed moment—a moment when podcasting went mainstream and became, soon enough, a big business. A decade later, and after nearly 1,700 episodes, Marc Maron has decided to bring WTF to an end, saying: “It really comes down to the fact that we’ve put up a new show every Monday and Thursday for almost sixteen years and we’re tired. We’re burnt out. And we are utterly satisfied with the work we’ve done. We’ve done great work.” On Monday, Maron dropped his final episode, bringing things full circle and talking once again with Barack Obama. If you’re going to leave your audience, especially during these dystopian times, it’s nice to leave them with some perspective and hope, and that’s what Obama does best. Watch the final episode above.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The 1976 Synth Album That Promised to Help Your Plants Grow: Discover Mother Earth’s Plantasia

in Music | October 13th, 2025

In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants became a bestseller. Drawing from the results of scientific studies about whose replicability we may now feel certain doubts, the book suggested that emotion, and indeed sentience, belong not just to humans and animals, but also to, say, the potted fern in your living room. Many of Tompkins and Bird’s readers must have owned such a plant, and probably a variety of others besides, given the nineteen-seventies’ fad for domestic vegetation. Though ridiculed in the major media, The Secret Life of Plants proved sufficiently in tune with its time to inspire a feature-length documentary film with a high-tech soundtrack by none other than Stevie Wonder.

Did Wonder ever hear the album Mother Earth’s Plantasia? Subtitled Warm Earth Music for Plants… and the People Who Love Them, the album also features electronic compositions — exclusively electronic compositions, in fact, performed entirely with a Moog synthesizer. Its composer Mort Garson had been a versatile professional in the world of what was then called “easy listening,” and worked on the writing, arrangement, or production of popular songs like Brenda Lee’s “Dynamite,” Ruby & The Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come,” The Sandpipers’ “Guantanamera,” and Bill Withers’ “Three Nights and a Morning.” Upon meeting Robert Moog himself at a convention in 1967, Garson seems to have undergone a conversion, becoming one of the first composers to dedicate himself to exploring the musical potential of the then-novel synthesizer technology.

The music Garson went on to make with his Moog reflects the zeitgeist: there was Electronic Hair Pieces, with versions of numbers from the musical Hair, a series of twelve discs based on the signs of the zodiac, and even the score that accompanied the Apollo 11 moon landing broadcast. Of particular interest to early electronic music buffs is Black Mass, for which Garson took the pseudonym Lucifer, and which ought to be worth adding to one’s library with Halloween coming up.

Mother Earth’s Plantasia was released in 1976, three years before the Secret Life of Plants movie, though released may not be the right word: it could only be obtained free with purchase of either a houseplant from a shop called Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles or a Simmons mattress from Sears. As music YouTuber David Hartley explains in his latest video, Garson was asked to create an album of music conducive to plant growth by Mother Earth’s owners, Lynn and Joel Rapp.

For decades thereafter, Mother Earth’s Plantasia could presumably be encountered by serious crate-diggers: the Pharcyde, for example, sampled one of its tracks on “Guestlist” in 2000. But it was only in the twenty-tens, after the establishment of YouTube and its obscure-music-uploading culture, that the album found an audience appreciative enough to inspire a proper release. (Its rediscovery played out similarly to that of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love,” the golden tip of the Japanese city pop revival.) Its tracks eventually even appeared in ad campaigns for TurboTax and the French supermarket chain Intermarché. To listeners today, they may sound uncannily like video game music as it would take shape in the eighties, albeit with a soft-edged analog texture. As far as whether it actually helps plants grow, even Joel Rapp’s liner notes can only manage the promise that “it couldn’t possibly hurt.” But I can report that it does a decent job putting my infant twins to sleep.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

in History, Literature | October 13th, 2025

My Penguin Classics copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi sits alone atop an overfull shelf. There is a bookmark on page 204, exactly halfway through, torn from an in-flight duty-free catalog—whiskey and fancy pens. It tells me “hey, you forgot to finish this, you [various obscenities].” And I shrug. What can I say? I went to grad school, where I learned to read ten books at once and never finish one. Good thing Mark Twain didn’t write that way, or we might not have Life on the Mississippi.

Twain was a diligent and conscientious writer with a memory like a bear trap, or at least that’s what he wanted us to think. But somewhere in his reminiscence he may have been confused. Twain wrote in his 1904 autobiography that his first novel written on a typewriter—the first typewritten novel at all—was Tom Sawyer.

Was this so? Twain purchased his first typewriter (which probably looked like the Sholes and Glidden seen here) in 1874 for $125. In 1875, he writes in a letter to the Remington company that he is no longer using his typewriter; it corrupts his morals because it makes him want to swear. He gives the infernal machine away, twice. It returns to him each time.

The year after Twain’s moral trouble with his Remington, Tom Sawyer is published from handwritten manuscript, not typed. Then, seven years later, Life on the Mississippi (1883) comes to the publisher in typescript. Twain did not type it himself—he had presumably renounced the act—but he dictated the memoir to a typist from a handwritten draft. Now, I can hear you quibbling… Life on the Mississippi isn’t a novel at all! Well, okay, fair enough. Let’s just say it’s the first typewritten book and call it a day, eh? Go read this excellent New Yorker piece on the early life of the typewriter and leave me alone. I’ve got a book to finish.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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Every Filmed and Televised Performance by Joy Division (1978–79)

in Music, Television | October 10th, 2025

Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that their first album sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures sold only 20,000 copies in its initial period of release, but the T‑shirt emblazoned with its cover art — an image of radio waves emanating from a pulsar taken from an astronomy encyclopedia — has long since constituted a commercial-semiotic empire unto itself. That speaks to the vast subcultural influence of the band, despite their only having been active from 1976 to 1980. When we speak of the genre of post-punk, we speak, in large part, of Joy Division and the artists they influenced.

Less than a year after the 1979 release of Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. The band had already recorded Closer, their second and last album (at least before the subsequent, more successful reformation as New Order). Scant though it may be, their studio discography has only drawn more and more critical acclaim over the decades.

Still, fans who weren’t around to witness the rise of Joy Division first-hand will suspect they’ve missed out on something essential. “Live, Joy Division were heavy,” remembers band historian Jon Savage. “Performers — and David Bowie is a good example – know exactly what to give and what to withhold, but Ian Curtis didn’t have that stagecraft. He just came on and gave everything.”

That sort of intensity, Savage adds, is “not infinitely reproducible”; even at the time, it seems that those who witnessed Joy Division in concert understood that their peculiarly compelling energy was driving toward some kind of final combustion. You can get a taste of it in the collection of the group’s every televised performance, originally aired on BBC2 and Granada TV in 1978 and 1979, at the top of the post; just above, we have a 70-minute compilation of all their filmed live shows. Much of it consists of footage shot over two nights at the Apollo Theatre in 1979, which the uploader describes as of poor quality — but “according to people who were there, the gig’s quality was poor in person too.” As much as generations of fans have done to mythologize the band’s brief existence over the past 45 years, here is evidence that even Joy Division had an off night once in a while.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Online

in Books, History | October 9th, 2025

For thousands of years, ordinary people all over the world not only worked side-by-side with domestic animals on a daily basis, they also observed the wild fauna around them to learn how to navigate and survive nature. The closeness produced a keen appreciation for animal behavior that informs the folk tales of every continent and the popular texts of every religion. Our delight in animal stories survives in children’s books, but in grown-up language, animal comparisons tend to be nasty and dehumanizing. The demeaning adjective “bestial” conveys a typical attitude not only toward people we don’t like, but toward the animal world as well. Orwell’s Animal Farm and Kafka’s Metamorphosis have become the standard references for modern animal allegory.

Early literature shows us a range of different attitudes, where animals are treated as equals, with character traits both good and bad, or as noble messengers of a god or gods rather than livestock, moving scenery, or exploitable resources.

We might refer in an eastern context to the Jataka Tales, fables of the Buddha’s many rebirths in the human and animal worlds that provide their readers with moral lessons. In the Christian west, we have the medieval bestiary—compendiums of animals, both real and mythological—that introduced readers to a moral typology through “reading” what early Christians thought of as the “book of nature.”

The most lavish of them all, the Aberdeen Bestiary, which dates from around 1200, was once owned by Henry VIII. Now, the University of Aberdeen has digitized the text and made it freely available to readers online. Beginning with the key creation stories from the book of Genesis, the book then dives into its descriptions of animals, beginning with the lion, the pard (panther), and the elephant.

You’ll notice that these are not animals that your typical medieval European reader would have encountered. One important difference between the bestiary and the fable is that the former draws many of its beasts from hearsay, conjecture, or pure fiction. But the intent is partly the same. These “were teaching tools,” notes Claire Voon at Hyperallergic, and the Aberdeen Bestiary contains illustrated “lengthy tales of moral behavior.”

Like the stories of Aesop, the bestiary presents important lessons, mixing in the fabulous with the naturalist. As Voon describes the Aberdeen Bestiary:

The illustrations are impressively varied, depicting common animals from tiny ants to elephants, as well as fantastic beasts, from the leocrota to the phoenix. Even the moral qualities of the humble sea urchin are honored with paragraphs of discussion. Beyond this array of creatures, the bestiary details the appearances and qualities of various trees, gems, and humans. Some of these may seem comical to 21st-century eyes: a swarm of bees, for instance, resembles an orderly line of shuttlecocks streaming into their hives. Yet other paintings are impressive for their near-accuracy, such as one image of a bat that shows how its membranous wings connect its fingers, legs, and tail. All of these rich details would have helped readers better understand the natural world as it was defined at the time of the book’s creation.

Incredibly ornate and bearing the marks of dozens of scribal hands, the book, historians believe, was originally produced for a wide audience, then taken by Henry’s librarians from a dissolved monastery. Never fully completed, it remained in the Royal Library for 100 years after Henry. “I doubt if the Tudor monarchs took it out for a regular read,” says Aberdeen University professor Jane Geddes. Now an open public document, it returns to its “original purpose of education,” writes Voon, “although for us, of course, it illuminates more about the past than the present.” See the high res scans here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Mark Twain Makes a List of 60 American Comfort Foods He Missed While Traveling Abroad (1880)

in Food & Drink, Literature, Travel | October 8th, 2025

Thinking of taking a trip abroad? Or maybe relocating for good? Americans would do well, even 150 years hence, to attend to Mark Twain’s satirical account of U.S. travelers journeying through Europe and Palestine, The Innocents Abroad. The “Americans who are painted to peculiar advantage by Mr. Clements” (sic), as fellow American satirist William Dean Howells wrote at the time, still roam the Earth—including travelers like one who “told the English officers that a couple of our gunboats could come and knock Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea.” The tactlessness and belligerence Twain skewered do not feel historically so far from home.

Twain’s portraits—“somewhat caricatured… or carefully and exactly done”—proved so popular with readers that he followed up with an unofficial sequel, 1880s A Tramp Abroad, a somewhat more serious fictionalized travelogue of Americans journeying through Europe; this time but two, Twain and his friend “Harris.” In the previous book, complained Howells, the reader learns “next to nothing about the population of the cities and the character of the rocks in the different localities.” Here, without his comedy troupe of traveling companions, Twain directs his focus outward with minute descriptions of his surroundings. He is, as usual, supremely curious, often perplexed, but mostly delighted by his experiences. Except when it comes to the food.

Growing “increasingly tired of an abundance of what he described as ‘fair-to-middling’ food,” writes Lists of Note, Twain comments: “The number of dishes is sufficient; but then it is such a monotonous variety of UNSTRIKING dishes […] Three or four months of this weary sameness will kill the robustest appetite.” Having never spent so long a time away, I cannot speak to Twain’s gustatory ennui, but I can relate, as no doubt can you, reader, to missing one or two familiar comfort foods (as well as “sincere and capable” ice water). Twain, perhaps not as adventurous an eater as he was a traveler—and in that sense also very much a modern American—made “an enormous list of the foods he’d missed the most, of which were to be consumed when he arrived home.”

The list, below, is itself a kind of travelogue, through the varieties of 19th century American cuisine, East, West, North, and South, including such delicacies as “’Possum” “Canvas-back-duck from Baltimore,” “Virginia bacon, broiled,” “Prairie hens, from Illinois,” and “Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.” While we might pine for a regional delicacy or favorite processed food, Twain conjured up in his mind’s gut a whole continent of food to come home to. What kinds of food do you find yourself missing when you travel? And how long a list might you find yourself making after several months tramping around in foreign lands? Tell us in the comments section below. For now, here’s Twain’s list:

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream
Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.
American coffee, with real cream.
American butter.
Fried chicken, Southern style.
Porter-house steak.
Saratoga potatoes.
Broiled chicken, American style.
Hot biscuits, Southern style.
Hot wheat-bread, Southern style.
Hot buckwheat cakes.
American toast. Clear maple syrup.
Virginia bacon, broiled.
Blue points, on the half shell.
Cherry-stone clams.
San Francisco mussels, steamed.
Oyster soup. Clam Soup.
Philadelphia Terapin soup.
Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style.
Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad.
Baltimore perch.
Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.
Lake trout, from Tahoe.
Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans.
Black bass from the Mississippi.
American roast beef.
Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.
Cranberry sauce. Celery.
Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.
Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore.
Prairie hens, from Illinois.
Missouri partridges, broiled.
‘Possum. Coon.
Boston bacon and beans.
Bacon and greens, Southern style.
Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips.
Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus.
Butter beans. Sweet potatoes.
Lettuce. Succotash. String beans.
Mashed potatoes. Catsup.
Boiled potatoes, in their skins.
New potatoes, minus the skins.
Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot.
Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes.
Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.
Green corn, on the ear.
Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style.
Hot hoe-cake, Southern style.
Hot egg-bread, Southern style.
Hot light-bread, Southern style.
Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk.
Apple dumplings, with real cream.
Apple pie. Apple fritters.
Apple puffs, Southern style.
Peach cobbler, Southern style
Peach pie. American mince pie.
Pumpkin pie. Squash pie.
All sorts of American pastry.
Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.
Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

When David Bowie Starred in—and Created Music for—a Dystopian Cyberpunk Video Game: Discover Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999)

in Music, Video Games | October 8th, 2025

When it was announced that SARS-CoV‑2, the virus at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, had evolved into an even more contagious variant called Omicron, public reactions varied. For those of us with long memories of computer and video gaming, it brought to mind a title we hadn’t thought about in quite some time: Omikron: The Nomad Soul, released for Windows in 1999 and the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. More than a few gamers know it as the debut of controversial designer David Cage, whose studio Quantic Dream has gone on to produce various games of considerable cinematic and emotional ambit (if also an often frustrating eccentricity). But it made a wider cultural impact at the time by incorporating the performance of none other than David Bowie.

Or rather, it incorporated performances, plural, by David Bowie: in the game, he used motion capture technology to play both Boz, the wholly digital leader of an ancient religious order, and the lead singer of the band The Dreamers, whose concerts (shown in the video above) the player can view here and there around the dystopian cyberpunk city of Omikron.

Originally, the developers had only gone to Bowie in order to license his songs for the game’s soundtrack, but, as explained in the mrixrt video below, the project so appealed to his technophilia that he proposed a much deeper involvement. That included recording a set of original songs, later included on his album Hours… (which is itself notable in the history of technology and culture for being one of the first downloadable releases by a major artist).

Among its many novel qualities, including pioneering the “open world” environment now standard in big-budget games, Omikron grants the player — as the titular “nomad soul” — the ability to inhabit the bodies of a host of other characters (including one played by Bowie’s wife Iman). It isn’t hard to imagine the concept’s appeal for a performer who made his name with frequent changes of identity — and who even suggested, at one point, that he leave that name behind in the reality of the game, re-emerging into public life as David Jones. By the time he died, the better part of two decades later, his role in gaming was mostly forgotten, but one of the many tributes paid to him included a free re-release of Omikron. Those who took the chance to revisit the game would have remembered the feeling it first gave them that its digital world continued even when they weren’t playing — accompanied by a sense that, somehow, Bowie continues to live within it.

A Tour of the New David Bowie Archive Featuring 90,000 Artifacts from His Life & Career

How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics

David Bowie Predicts the Good & Bad of the Internet in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Something Exhilarating and Terrifying”

The David Bowie Monopoly Game Is Here: Advance to GO and Collect 200 Hunky Dorys!

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep

in Health | October 8th, 2025

Give Dr. Andrew Weil three minutes, and he can teach you a 60-second technique for falling asleep. Above, the alternative medicine guru walks you through the 4–7‑8 breathing method. As he demonstrates, it “takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.” And once you master it, you can use the 4–7‑8 breathing technique (explained and demonstrated in greater detail here ) to lower your anxiety levels (useful these days!), navigate tension-filled moments, and deal with food cravings.

Elsewhere, Weil has said, “If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly.” Hence why he created an audio recording, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing, which you can still purchase online.

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How a Good Night’s Sleep — and a Bad Night’s Sleep — Can Enhance Your Creativity

Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health

10 Hours of Ambient Arctic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Meditate, Study & Sleep

240 Hours of Relaxing, Sleep-Inducing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Runner to Star Wars

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

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The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Online

Mark Twain Makes a List of 60 American Comfort Foods He Missed While Traveling Abroad (1880)

When David Bowie Starred in—and Created Music for—a Dystopian Cyberpunk Video Game: Discover Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999)

Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep

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