Pablo Picasso, as you may know, produced a fair few memorable works in his long lifetime. He also came up with a number of quotable quotes. "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction" has particularly stuck with me, but one does wonder what an artist who thinks this way actually does when he creates — or, rather, when he first destroys, then creates. Luckily for us, we can watch Picasso in action, in vintage footage from several different films-first, at the top of the post, in a clip from 1950’s Visite à Picasso by Belgian artist and filmmaker Paul Haesaerts (which you can watch online: part one, part two). In it, Picasso paints on glass in front of the camera, thus enabling us to see the painter at work from, in some sense, the painting’s perspective. Just above, you can watch another, similarly filmed clip from Visite à Picasso. Both of them show how Picasso could, without much in the way of apparent advance planning or thought, simply begin creating art, literally at a stroke — on which would follow another stroke, and another, and another. "Action is the foundational key to all success," he once said, words even more widely applicable than the observation about creation as destruction, and here we can see his actions becoming art before our eyes. It also happens in the clip above, though this time captured from a more standard over-the-shoulder perspective. "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls," Picasso also said, and one senses something of that ablutionary ritual (and not just because of how little clothing the man has chosen to wear) in the footage below, wherein he lays down lines on a canvas the size of an entire wall. It comes from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 documentary The Mystery of Picasso, which offers a wealth of close looks at Picasso’s process. You can watch the film online here, or see a few Picasso paintings come together in time-lapse in the trailer above. "The paintings created by Picasso in this film cannot be seen anywhere else," the crawl at the end of the trailer informs us. "They were destroyed upon completion of the film." So it seems that at least some acts of creation, for Picasso himself, not only began with an act of destruction, but ended with one too. Related Content: Vintage Footage of Picasso and Jackson Pollock Painting … Through Glass Iconic Artists at Work: Watch Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet and More Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein Behold Pablo Picasso’s Illustrations of Balzac’s Short Story "The Hidden Masterpiece" (1931) Pablo Picasso’s Tender Illustrations For Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1934) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Travel Back in Time and See Picasso Make Abstract Art is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Given the efforts of people like Malcolm McLaren to turn punk rock into a viable commercial product—or at least a quick cash grab—it’s a little surprising it took as long as it did for "pop punk" to find its profitable 90s/oughties teenage niche. Always a catch-all term for an eclectic variety of styles, punk instead further diversified in the eighties into various kinds of post-punk, hardcore, and new wave. The latter development, however, quickly found a commercial audience, with its successful fusion of 70s pop, reggae, and disco elements with punk’s wry, arty-outsider sensibility. Artists like Gary Numan, Blondie, DEVO, Talking Heads, and even The Clash emerged from the 70s with highly danceable hits that set the tone for the sound of the next decade. But first the public had to learn what new wave was, and many of them did in a surprisingly mainstream way, in the 1979 special produced by ABC’s 20/20 in two parts here. By comparison with the number of awkwardly clueless or blatantly sensationalistic news reports on emerging youth cultures over the decades, the show is "impressively astute," writes Dangerous Minds, "for a news segment on new music from one of the major TV networks." It features a number of the above-named artists—DEVO, Blondie, Talking Heads—and makes an interesting attempt to situate the music on a continuum with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Rolling Stones. The segment claims that new wave both satirized and updated rock and pop—with DEVO’s cover of "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction" as Exhibit A. And while new wave would eventually glam it up with the best of the 70s disco acts—think Duran Duran or the bubblegum pop of Flock of Seagulls or Kajagoogoo—in its first, post-punk phase, the music stripped things down to 50s simplicity. Elvis Costello gets called in to represent the revivalism inherent in the nascent form, heralding a "rediscovery of the rock and roll audience." There are problems with the history: punk gets labeled "an extreme element of new wave" and "a British phenomenon," where it makes more sense to call it a precursor with roots in Detroit and New York. It’s a nitpicky point, and one shouldn’t expect too much accuracy in a top-down network news report. The real treat here is the performance clips and rare interviews. Even with the poor video quality, they’re all well worth watching, especially the extended focus on the Talking Heads in the second part above. As Dangerous Minds writes, "it takes an effort of will to remember how weird David Byrne… must have seemed to a mainstream audience in 1979." Or not. He still comes off as pretty odd to me, and the music still fresh and inventive. Note: Elvis Costello has just published a new autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. And he narrates the audiobook version, which you can download for free (along with another audiobook) if you join Audible.com’s 30-day Free Trial program. Get details on the 30-day trial here. And get Elvis Costello’s audiobook, by clicking here and then clicking the "Try Audible Free" button in the upper right. via Dangerous Minds Related Content: Take a Virtual Tour of CBGB, the Early Home of Punk and New Wave See Very Early Concert Footage of the B-52s, When New Wave Music Was Actually New (1978) The Talking Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness New Wave Music-DEVO, Talking Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costello-Gets Introduced to America by ABC’s TV Show, 20/20 (1979) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Tony Zhou’s video essay series, Every Frame a Painting, returns with "Buster Keaton: The Art of the Gag." Although his series never disappoints, this particular installment may be one of Tony’s best, taking you inside the comedic gags of Buster Keaton, a founding father of visual comedy. If you’ve ever found it hard to appreciate the artistry of filmmakers from the silent era, then you will definitely want to give this a watch. And once you’ve taken it all in, you’ll likely want to spend time with our previous post: The General, "Perhaps the Greatest Film Ever Made," and 20 Other Buster Keaton Classics Free Online. Also don’t miss this collection featuring another founding father of visual comedy: 65 Free Charlie Chaplin Films. Related Content: The Art of Making Intelligent Comedy Movies: 8 Take-Aways from the Films of Edgar Wright The Geometric Beauty of Akira Kurosawa and Wes Anderson’s Films The Filmmaking Craft of David Fincher Demystified in Two Video Essays The Power of Silent Movies, with The ArtistDirector Michel Hazanavicius Buster Keaton: The Wonderful Gags of the Founding Father of Visual Comedy is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

"I started playing the guitar about 6 or 7, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. I was influenced by everything at the same time, that’s why I can’t get it together now." When you listen to Jimi Hendrix, one of the last things you’re ever likely to think is that he couldn’t "get it together" as a guitarist. Hendrix made the characteristically modest statement in 1968, in a free form discussion about his influences with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner and Baron Wolfman. "I used to like Buddy Holly," he said, "and Eddie Cochran and Muddy Waters and Elvin James… B.B. King and so forth." But his great love was Albert King, who "plays completely and strictly in one way, just straight funk blues." Since Hendrix’s death and subsequent enshrinement in pop culture as the undisputed master of psychedelic rock guitar, a number of posthumous releases have performed a kind of revisionism that situates him not strictly in the context of the hippie scene but rather in the blues tradition he so admired and that, in a sense, he came of age within as a session and backing guitarist for dozens of blues and R&B artists in the early 60s. In 1994 came the straightforwardly-titled compilation album Blues, which celebrated the fact that "more than a third of [Hendrix’s] recordings were blues-oriented," writes Allmusic’s Richie Unterberger, whether originals like "Red House" and "Hear My Train a Comin’" or covers of his heroes Muddy Waters and Albert King. Martin Scorsese devoted a segment of his documentary series The Blues to Hendrix, and an ensuing 2003 album release featured even more Hendrix blues originals (with "pretty cool" liner notes about his blues record collecting habits). Prolific director Alex Gibney has a documentary forthcoming on Hendrix on the Blues. It’s safe to say that Hendrix’s blues legacy is in safe hands, and it may be safe to say he would approve, or at least that he would have preferred to be linked to the blues, or classical music, than to what he called "freak-out psychedelic" music, as a Guardian review of Hendrix autobiography Starting at Zero quotes; "I don’t want anybody to stick a psychedelic label around my neck. Sooner Bach and Beethoven." Or sooner, I’d imagine, blues legends like Albert King, Buddy Guy, and B.B. King, of whom Hendrix sat in awe. At the top of the post, you can see Hendrix flex his Delta blues muscles on a 12-string acoustic guitar. Then in the video below it from 1968, Hendrix gets the chance to jam with Buddy Guy, after watching Guy work his magic from the audience. (Hendrix joins Guy onstage to jam at 6:24.) The audio just above captures a jam session with B.B. King and Hendrix from the same year at New York’s Generation Club, and below, see Guy and King reminiscing a few years ago about those days of meeting and playing with Hendrix. During their conversation, you’ll learn where Hendrix picked up one of his stage tricks, playing the guitar behind his head—and learn how little Guy knew about Hendrix the rock star, coming to know him instead as a great blues guitarist. Related Content: Jimi Hendrix Unplugged: Two Great Recordings of Hendrix Playing Acoustic Guitar The Jimi Hendrix Experience Plays "Hey Joe" & "Wild Thing" on The Band’s Very First Tour: Paris, 1966 Jimi Hendrix’s Final Interview on September 11, 1970: Listen to the Complete Audio B.B. King Changes Broken Guitar String Mid-Song at Farm Aid, 1985 and Doesn’t Miss a Beat Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Jimi Hendrix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Guitar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Buddy Guy & B.B. King is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Having moved to Korea a couple weeks ago, I won’t have the chance to partake this year in the beloved institution of American culture known as Thanksgiving. (Korea has its own Thanksgiving, but it happened two months ago.) Maybe you live in the United States and thus almost certainly have a Thanksgiving dinner of some kind, big or small, coming soon. Or maybe you, like me, live elsewhere in the world, and thus in a place without the same tradition. Either way, you can surely partake this Thanksgiving in the beloved institution of American culture known as the work of William S. Burroughs. Here we have a short film of Burroughs, best known as the author of a body of controversial and experimental literature, including books like Junky and Naked Lunch, shot by Gus Van Sant, best known as the director of films like Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, and Drugstore Cowboy, the last of which includes a memorable appearance by Burroughs himself. It captures Burroughs reading his poem "Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986," also known as his "Thanksgiving Prayer." Van Sant shot it two Thanksgivings after that one, in 1988, the year before Drugstore Cowboy (and six years after adapting Burrough’s story "The Discipline of D.E." into an early short film). Burroughs, a lifelong critic of America, fills his prayer with bitterly sarcastic "thanks" for things like "a continent to despoil and poison," "Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger," "the KKK," and "Prohibition and the war against drugs" (about which his character in Drugstore Cowboy had some particularly choice words). He ends by expressing ironic, Great Gatsby-quoting gratitude for "the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams." Like him — like most everybody — I have my own, if less deep-seated, frustrations with our homeland, and perhaps in leaving I subconsciously emulated his stretches of expatriatism in Mexico, England, France, and Morocco. But I sincerely doubt that I’ve had my last Thanksgiving on U.S. soil; for all its failings, America remains too interesting to stay away from entirely. After all, what other country could possibly produce a writer, a personality, or a critic like William S. Burroughs? Related Content: The Making of Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant’s First Major Film (1989) William S. Burroughs Teaches a Free Course on Creative Reading and Writing (1979) The Discipline of D.E.: Gus Van Sant Adapts a Story by William S. Burroughs William S. Burroughs Reads His First Novel, Junky Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. William S. Burroughs Reads His Sarcastic "Thanksgiving Prayer" in a 1988 Film By Gus Van Sant is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In ostensibly liberal democracies in the West, attitudes towards free speech vary widely given different historical contexts, and can shift dramatically over time. We’re living in the midst of a generational shift on the issue in the U.S.; a recent Pew survey found that 40 percent of millennials—18-34 year olds—favor government bans on offensive speech. The usual caveats apply when reading this data; New York magazine’s Science of Us blog breaks down the demographics and points out problems with definitions, particularly with that of the word "offensive." They write, "plenty of folks freak out about anti-cop sentiments but are fine with racially loaded language—or insert your own examples." As commentators note almost daily, various free speech advocates show all manner of partiality when it comes to whose speech they choose to defend and whose they, unwittingly perhaps, suppress. European countries, of course, already have all sorts of laws that curb offensive speech and impose harsh penalties, from large fines to jail time. Those laws are extending to the internet as well, a speech domain long censored by Chinese authorities. Whether European measures against racist and xenophobic speech actually lessen racism and xenophobia is an open question, as is the problem of exceptions to the laws that seem to allow certain kinds of prejudices as they strongly censor others. Much more extreme examples of the suppression of free speech have recently come to light under autocratic regimes in the Middle East. In Syria, software developer and free speech advocate Bassel Khartabil has been held in prison since 2012 for his activism. In Saudi Arabia, artist, poet, and Palestinian refugee Ashraf Fayadh has been sentenced to death for "renouncing Islam." We could add to all of these examples hundreds of others, from all over the world, but in addition to the statistics and the disturbing individual cases, it is worth asking broader, more philosophical questions about free speech as we draw our own conclusions about the issues. What exactly do we mean by "free speech"? Should all speech be protected, even that meant to libel individuals or whole groups or to deliberately incite violence? Should we tolerate a public discourse made up of lies, misinformation, prejudicial invective, and personal attacks? Should citizens and the press have the right to question official government narratives and to demand transparency? https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/D.J.-Taylor-on-Orwell-and-Free-Speech.mp3 To help us think through these politically and emotionally fraught discussions, we could listen to Free Speech Bites, a podcast sponsored by the Index on Censorship and hosted by freelance philosopher Nigel Warburton, who also hosts the popular podcast Philosophy Bites. The format is identical to that long-standing show, but instead of short conversations with philosophers, Warburton has brief, lively discussions with free speech advocates, including authors, artists, politicians, journalists, comedians, cartoonists, and academics. In the episode above, Warburton talks with DJ Taylor, biographer of the man considered almost a saint of free speech, George Orwell. Of his subject, Taylor remarks, "I think it’s true to say that most of Orwell’s professional life, large amounts of the things that he wrote, are to do with the suppression of the individual voice." At the same time, he points out that Orwell’s "view of free speech is by no means clear cut." The "whole free speech issue became much more delicately shaded than it would otherwise have been" during the extraordinary times of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Taylor refers to the "classic liberal dilemma: how far do we tolerate something that, if tolerated, will cease to tolerate us…. If you are living in a democracy and somebody’s putting out fascist pamphlets encouraging the end of that democracy, how much rope do you give them?" https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Irshad-Manji-on-Islam-and-Free-Expression.mp3 In another episode, Irshad Manji—feminist, self-described "Muslim refusenik," and author of The Trouble with Islam Today—talks free speech and religion, and offers a very different perspective than what we’re used to hearing reported from Islamic thinkers. When Warburton says that Islam and free expression sound "like two incompatible things," Manji counters that as a "person of faith" she believes "free expression is as much a religious obligation as it is a human right." In her estimation, "no human being can legitimately behave as if he or she owns a monopoly on truth." Anything less than a society that tolerates civil disagreement, she says, means that "we’re playing God with one another." In her religious perspective, "devoting yourself to one god means that you must defend human liberty." Manji sounds much more like Enlightenment Christian reformers like John Locke than she does many interpreters of Islam, and she is well aware of the unpopularity of her point of view in much of the Islamic world. https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Jonathan-Dimbley-on-Free-Speech-and-Censorship.mp3 Addressing the question of why free speech matters, broadcaster and writer Jonathan Dimbleby—former chair of the Index on Censorship—inaugurated the podcast in 2012 with a more classically philosophical discussion of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and the liberal argument against censorship Mill and others articulated. For Dimbleby, "freedom of expression [is] not only a right but a defining characteristic of what it means to be a civilized individual." It’s a view he holds "very strongly," but he admits that the valid exceptions to the rule are "where the difficult territory starts." Dimbleby points to "very obvious circumstances when you don’t have freedom of expression and should not have freedom of expression." One of the exceptions involves "laws that say that if you express yourself freely, you are directly putting someone else’s life at risk." This is not as clear-cut as it seems. The "dangerous territory," he argues, begins with circumscribing language that incites anger or offense in others. We are back to the question of offense, and it is not a uncomplicated one. Although activists very often need to be uncivil to be heard at all, there’s also a necessary place for public discussions that are as thoughtful and careful as we can manage. And for that reason, I’m grateful for the intervention of Free Speech Bites and the international variety of views it represents. For more of those views, see the Index on Censorship’s website to stream or download seven more Free Speech Bites podcasts. Related Content: What "Orwellian" Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You! Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Yale Course Great Writers on Free Speech and the Environment Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness   Free Speech Bites: Nigel Warburton, Host of Philosophy Bites, Creates a Spin Off Podcast Dedicated to Freedom of Expression is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Moderate coffee consumption may decrease your risk of dying prematurely from cardiovascular disease, reduce your risk of letting colon cancer take you to the grave, possibly help you stave off dementia, and maybe, writes The New York Times, dodge a number of other bullets-"Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma (the most common skin cancer), prostate cancer, oral cancer and breast cancer recurrence." Pour me a cup, please. These days, I’m feeling pretty good about my last remaining vice. But, as always, too much of anything is not a good thing. And that includes coffee too. Just ask Honoré de Balzac, who, according to legend, met an untimely death by drinking 50 cups per day. Or ask the fellow featured in the French animation called Le café-or simply Coffee in English. Up top, you can find a subtitled version of the riotous film directed by Stephanie Marguerite and Emilie Tarascou. Beneath, we have a non-subtitled but higher resolution version. Enjoy, and remember to drink coffee responsibly. More creative shorts can be found in the Animation section of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard David Lynch Directs a Mini-Season of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials J.S. Bach’s Comic Opera, "The Coffee Cantata," Sings the Praises of the Great Stimulating Drink (1735) "The Virtues of Coffee" Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More A Rollicking French Animation on the Perils of Drinking a Little Too Much Coffee is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

What work of American poetry has proven more irresistible than Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven? Certainly we can seldom refrain ourselves from featuring it here on Open Culture. We’ve posted illustrations by Édouard Manet and Gustave Doré, readings by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee (all available here), James Earl Jones, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed, who offered his own modernized take on Poe’s words. Even notables primarily noted for something other than their recitation ability have got in on The Raven: just above, for instance, you can see a reading by none other than Marvel Comics mastermind Stan Lee. We recognize Stan Lee, of course, as an icon of American culture for his achievements in the field of comics: doing his part to create enduring characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the X-Men, fighting censorship from the Comics Code Authority, introducing the concept of coherent — or at least coherent-enough — fictional "universes," and much more besides. But a decent portion of Lee’s fame also owes to his seemingly bottomless well of enthusiasm, from which he continues to draw, at the age of 92, for every public address to the "true believers," and he doesn’t leave that enthusiasm behind when it comes time to interpret Edgar Allan Poe. Having previously gone on the record in interviews naming Poe as one of his favorite authors in childhood (alongside other such high-, low-, and middle-browed literary immortals as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Shakespeare), he makes a certain kind of sense as a Raven-reader. (And hasn’t, say, Spider-Man’s origin story passed into American myth in much the same way as Poe’s tale of a lamenting lover tormented by a talking bird?) He also sets a high bar with his endearing performance itself, which should get you thinking: if you, too, one day become an icon of American culture, how will you approach your inevitable Raven-reading turn? You can find Lee’s reading in our collection, 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Poe’s text lives here: 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. Related Content: Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875) Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" (1884) Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee James Earl Jones Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" and Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven." See Readings by Reed and Willem Dafoe 7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Stories and Poems Download the Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe on His Birthday Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you’re thirsty, a vending machine is usually close by. (Especially if you’re in Japan. You’re probably standing right next to one right now!) But what if you have time to kill and you’re thirsty for literature? Then the Short Édition vending machine might be for you. Choose one of three buttons—one minutes, three minutes, or five minutes—and the cylindrical machine, currently available in France, will print out an appropriately-long short story to read on a receipt-like piece of paper. Short Édition co-founder Quentin Pleple says the idea came to him, where else, at a vending machine, while on break with co-workers."We thought it would be cool to have it for short stories. Then, a couple of days later we decided to hack a prototype." Though people spend a lot of their free time on their pocket devices, the Short Édition is another attempt-like the short stories Chipotle printed on the side of its drinking cups-to free us from a life of staring at glowing rectangles. It’s tangible yet disposable at the same time. At the turn of the 20th century automation and vending machines looked to be the wave of the future, where everything would be done for us on command. And that has happened in a totally different way, through the microprocessor. It just didn’t happen through the vending machine, at least not in America, where they mostly dispense food, drink, and cigarettes. Like high speed rail, Japan has picked up the slack and made the world rethink the machine’s possibilities all over again. It now looks like France and Poland (where you can find Haruki Murakami novels being sold in vending machines) are catching on. The Short Édition vending machines, currently only available in eight locations in Grenoble, France, draw from a database of 600 stories chosen by the community at Short Édition’s website, which counts 1,100 authors as members. Presumably, all these stories are in French. While new, the machines have gathered enough media attention to attract inquiries from Italy and the United States. So look out, you might find one in your area soon. via Huff Po Related Content: Support "Green Reads," a Program That Finances Libraries by Distributing Used Books in Eco-Friendly Vending Machines Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. French Vending Machines Fill Your Mind with Nourishing Short Stories, Not Your Body with Junk Food is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Fitting, I suppose, that the only creative meeting of the minds between two of the twentieth century’s best-known film directors took place on a project about the problem of nonhuman intelligence and the dangerous excesses of human ingenuity. For both Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, these were conflicts rich with inherent dramatic possibility. One of the many important differences between their approaches, however, is a stark one. As many critics of AI: Artificial Intelligence—the film Kubrick had in development since the 70s, then handed off to Spielberg before he died—have pointed out, Kubrick mined conflict for philosophical insights that can leave viewers intriguingly puzzled, if emotionally chilled; Spielberg pushes his drama for maximum emotional impact, which either warms audiences’ hearts or turns their stomachs, depending on their disposition. In the latter camp, we can firmly place Monty Python alumnus and cult director Terry Gilliam. In the short clip at the top of the post, Gilliam explicates "the main difference" as he sees it between Spielberg and Kubrick. Spielberg’s films are "comforting," they "give you answers, always, the films are… answers, and I don’t they’re very clever answers." Kubrick’s movies, on the other hand, always leave us with unanswerable questions—riddles that linger indefinitely and that no one viewer can satisfactorily solve. So says Gilliam, an infamously quixotic director whose pursuit of a vision uniquely his own has always trumped any commercial appeal his work might have. Most successful films, he argues, "tie things up in neat little bows." For Gilliam, this is a cardinal sin: "the Kubricks of this world, and the great filmmakers, make you go home and think about it." Certainly every fan of Kubrick will admit as much—as will those who don’t like his films, often for the very same reasons. To make his point, Gilliam quotes Kubrick himself, who issued an incisive critique of Spielberg’s Nazi drama Schindler’s List, saying that the movie "is about success. The Holocaust was about failure"—the "complete failure," Gilliam adds, "of civilization." Not a subject one can, or should, even attempt to spin positively, one would think. As an example of a Kubrick film that leaves us with an epistemological and emotional vortex, Gilliam cites the artificial intelligence picture the great director did finish, 2001: A Space Odyssey. To see in action how these two directors’ approaches greatly diverge, watch the endings of both Schindler’s List and 2001, above. Of course the genre and subject matter couldn’t be more different—but that aside, you’ll note that neither could Kubrick and Spielberg’s visual languages and cinematic attitudes, in any of their films. Despite this vast divide—between Spielberg’s "neat little bows" and Kubrick’s headtrips—it might be argued that their one collaboration, albeit a posthumous one for Kubrick, shows them working more closely together than seems possible. Or so argues Noel Murray in a fascinating critical take on AI, a film that perhaps deserves greater appreciation as an "unnerving," existentialist, and Kubrick-ian turn for Spielberg, that master of happy endings. Related Content: Terry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Monty Python Animations: A 1974 How-To Guide Stanley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Interview with The New Yorker In 1968, Stanley Kubrick Makes Predictions for 2001: Humanity Will Conquer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn German in 20 Minutes Auschwitz Captured in Haunting Drone Footage (and a New Short Film by Steven Spielberg & Meryl Streep)   Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Terry Gilliam on the Difference Between Kubrick & Spielberg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spielberg Wraps Everything Up with Neat Little Bows is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.