“We’re on the cusp of some­thing exhil­a­rat­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing.” The year is 1999 and David Bowie, in shag­gy hair and groovy glass­es, has seen the future and it is the Inter­net. In this short but fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with BBC’s stal­wart and with­er­ing inter­roga­tor cum inter­view­er Jere­my Pax­man, Bowie offers a […]

What do you imag­ine when you hear the phrase “cat piano”? Some kind of whim­si­cal fur­ry beast with black and white keys for teeth, maybe? A rel­a­tive of My Neigh­bor Totoro’s cat bus? Or maybe you pic­ture a piano that con­tains sev­er­al caged cats who shriek along an entire scale when keys […]

Hayao Miyaza­ki began his career as an ani­ma­tor in 1963, get­ting in the door at Toei Ani­ma­tion not long before the com­pa­ny ceased to hire reg­u­lar­ly. Miyaza­k­i’s equal­ly retire­ment-resis­tant con­tem­po­rary Tet­suya Chi­ba, already well on his way to fame as a man­ga­ka, or com­ic artist, pub­lished the series Yuki no […]

Howl­in’ Wolf may well have been the great­est blues singer of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Cer­tain­ly many peo­ple have said so, but there are oth­er mea­sure­ments than mere opin­ion, though it’s one I hap­pen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Bur­nett also had a pro­found his­tor­i­cal effect on pop­u­lar cul­ture, […]

When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he won the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. More than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the book still fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open […]

It’s easy to dis­miss The Mon­kees. Crit­ics and lis­ten­ers have been doing it since the six­ties, although the band has also come in for its share of reap­praisals, par­tic­u­lar­ly for their psych-rock album Head. (That’s the sound­track from the 1968 Jack Nichol­son-direct­ed art film of the same name: “One of […]

Apart from his comedic, dra­mat­ic, and lit­er­ary endeav­ors, Stephen Fry is wide­ly known for his avowed technophil­ia. He once wrote a col­umn on that theme, “Dork Talk,” for the Guardian, in whose inau­gur­al dis­patch he laid out his cre­den­tials by claim­ing to have been the own­er of only the sec­ond […]