A quick heads up, Wilco just released its ninth studio album, Star Wars. And right now you can download it for free via Wilco’s website. But don’t dilly dally, the free download will only be available for 30 days. On the band’s Instagram account, Jeff Tweedy gave a simple explanation for the unexpected giveaway: "Well, the biggest reason, and I’m not sure we even need any others, is that it felt like it would be fun." Indeed. Last week: we highlighted a couple more downloads that will be free for a limited time. Find them below. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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. Related Content: Free: Download Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Short Course, The Inexplicable Universe, in Audio or Video Format Download The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss as a Free Audio Book Free: Download Wilco’s Brand New Album, Star Wars, Free for a Limited Time 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/free-download-wilcos-brand-new-album-star-wars-free-for-a-limited-time.html 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. The post Free: Download Wilco’s Brand New Album, Star Wars, Free for a Limited Time appeared first on Open Culture.

Noted cartoon personality Bugs Bunny has warbled his way through Wagnerian opera, played every defensive position known to baseball, styled a monster’s hair…is there anything that wascally wabbit cannot do? Yes, in fact. According to his long time director, animator Chuck Jones, Bugs could never pick a fight. Unlike his hair trigger Looney Tunes colleague, Daffy Duck, the bunny had to be provoked before entering the fray. That applies whether he’s a boxer, a gangster, or impersonating the biggest movie stars of his day. Abiding by the strong rules he established for the characters in the Looney Tunes stable was critical to his comic approach, as Jones explains in the above video essay, a bit of a departure for Tony Zhou’s celebrated cinema series, Every Frame a Picture. Rather than examine the framing and timing of "one of the all-time masters of visual comedy," this time Zhou delves into the evolution of his subject’s artistic sensibilities. Like all good directors, Jones learned from his actors-in this case, animated, and not all of them his babies. Bugs and Daffy were the brainchildren of the great Tex Avery. Friz Freleng created Yosemite Sam and everyone’s favorite stuttering pig, Porky. Jones teased out the desires that became the primary engines for those characters’ physicality as well as their behavior. Daffy comes off as an unhinged lunatic in his early appearances. His comic potential grew once Jones reframed him as a conniver who’d do anything in pursuit of wealth and glory. Once the characters’ motivations were clear, Jones could mess around with the ol’ one-two punch. It’s a classic comic structure, wherein reality wreaks havoc on the audience’s expectations about how things should unfold. Then again, a child can tell you what drives Jones’ creation, the passionate French skunk, Pepé Le Pew, as well as how those amorous ambitions of his are likely to work out. Funny! Dependably so! Zhou also draws attention to the evolution of the characters’ expressions, from the antic to the economical. John Belushi was not the only comic genius to understand the power of a raised eyebrow. Related Content: Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules For Drawing Road Runner Cartoons, or How to Create a Minimalist Masterpiece How to Draw Bugs Bunny: A Primer by Legendary Animator Chuck Jones The Strange Day When Bugs Bunny Saved the Life of Mel Blanc Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

A couple of years ago we published a post on "what Shakespeare sounded like to Shakespeare" which highlighted some prominent linguists’ attempts to recreate the Elizabethan speech patterns and accents of the playwright’s day. There may be some small debate about whether or not they succeeded, but we’ll never know for certain since his day is long behind us. In some ways, the nature of Shakespeare’s language may have been more French, or more Latinate, or more Saxon, than the English we speak today—depending on the proportion of regionalisms commingling in any given play, like characters in a national bazaar. Our current version of the language may have absorbed another four hundred years of global influence, but in the process it has also become more homogenized and standardized. Shakespeare’s language was both more provincial and more riotously diverse-in spelling and pronunciation-than many kinds of English we speak today. Perhaps this is one reason we think of Shakespeare as a universal poet—the heterodoxy of his speech, and hence a variability of characters found in few other literatures. Even his stock types seem to have individual voices. The degree of interplay between high and low speech—city and country, comic and tragic, lyric and prosaic—may be why nearly every world language has found a way to adapt his work, accenting some qualities and muting others. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can see for yourself at the MIT Global Shakespeare’s Video & Performance Archive, which hosts dozens of Shakespeare stagings in dozens of languages, like the mesmerizing Japanese Lear above, or the heartracingly intense one-woman clip from the Argentine Hamlet la metamorphosis at the top, a melodramatic production that would thrill David Lynch. Additionally, the database aggregates "essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field" of international Shakespeare studies. Even among the thousands of English-language adaptations of Shakespeare’s work we find an international diversity of speech. The Spotify playlist above, brought to us by Ulysses Classical (makers of the Stanley Kubrick Playlist), presents a huge collection of recorded Shakespeare plays and poems, as well as the scores and incidental music for English-language productions. The actors represented-Sirs Gielgud, Olivier, and McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Edith Evans-are mostly English stage royalty, but we also have Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and actor Richard Burton, and Americans Paul Robeson, Rosalind Russell, and Orson Welles. The value of such a collection is inestimable-68 hours of Shakespeare read and performed by some of the world’s finest actors. But it is indeed a specific slice of the world. Even in English it feels (forgive the puns) that all the world could be represented here, doing Shakespeare in every kind of English around the globe. Perhaps such a global approach to teaching Shakespeare in English would add nuance to debates about whether his work is still relevant in American high school and college classrooms. In any case, there seem to be few barriers to actors and directors for approaching Shakespeare with new translations and with fresh eyes, ears, and costumes, again and again. You can access the Spotify playlist on the web here. If you need to download Spotify, find it here. Related Content: What Shakespeare Sounded Like to Shakespeare: Reconstructing the Bard’s Original Pronunciation Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library Free Online Shakespeare Courses: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley & More Orson Welles’ Radio Performances of 10 Shakespeare Plays 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Performed by Great Actors: Gielgud, McKellen & More 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/a-68-hour-playlist-of-shakespeares-plays-being-performed-by-great-actors.html 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. The post A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Performed by Great Actors: Gielgud, McKellen & More appeared first on Open Culture.

Here at Open Culture, the 150th anniversary celebration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland keeps going and going, because, well, who knows what form the internet will have taken by the time of the 200th? It might well bear more of a resemblance to the logical-yet-illogical reality in which the story’s title character finds herself than any of the things we’ve yet used, or imagined. You may laugh, but Lewis Carroll’s ideas have long drawn the fascination of programmers, computer scientists, and the other architects of the infoscape through which we navigate today. They’ve also, of course, attracted the fascination of other artists, from Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, who wrote an early script for Disney’s film, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas illustrator Ralph Steadman, who did his own illustrated edition of the book. Today, we give you Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the medium of sand animation, as practiced by sand animator Magdalena Bak. At just under eight minutes and thirty seconds, it will only take you a fraction as long to watch as most of Alice‘s other cinematic adaptations (though not the very first, made in 1903, which clocks in at twenty seconds shorter). It may also introduce you to an animation medium you’ve never seen before. If you’d like to watch more of what an animator can do with sand, have a look at the wide variety of sand animations we’ve previously featured: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons animated in sand, Kafka’s Metamorphosis animated in sand, Goethe’s "Der Erlkönig" animated in sand, modern desert warfare animated in sand, and even a Spanish-language music video animated in sand. Sand may strike you as an unusual storytelling medium, but surely Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, even 150 years after its first publication, remains an unusual story. Related Content: See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary See the Original Alice In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864) Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Alice Liddell, the Inspiration for Alice in Wonderland When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Brought to Life in Sand Animations by the Hungarian Artist Ferenc Cakó The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977) Watch Goethe’s Haunting Poem, "Der Erlkönig," Presented in an Artful Sand Animation Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Lewis Carroll’s Classic Story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Told in Sand Animation 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-told-in-sand-animation.html 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. The post Lewis Carroll’s Classic Story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Told in Sand Animation appeared first on Open Culture.

If you google my name, spelled in the unconventional way that I spell it, the first search results won’t having anything to do with me. They’ll reference another Dan Colman who, in the past year, has made a good chunk of change playing poker — including winning $15.3 million in one tournament alone. He apparently did it all without availing himself of MIT’s course — Poker Theory and Analytics — taught by Kevin Desmond, a graduate student in MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Desmond has competed at the top levels of the poker world and worked as a Morgan Stanley analyst, and he contends that being successful in both realms requires "balancing expected returns against associated risks and," … and "the key to success is self-discipline." According to MIT News, Poker Theory and Analytics introduced students to poker strategy, psychology, and decision-making in eleven lectures." Along with giving students the chance to play endless rounds of poker, the class featured guest speakers — "Bill Chen, a professional player best known for his appearances on the Game Show Network’s High Stakes Poker television show, Matt Hawrilenko, a Princeton graduate who won more than $1 million at the World Series of Poker in 2009, and Aaron Brown, chief risk manager at AQR Capital Management." And it culminated with a live tournament. You can access all of the lectures for the Poker Theory and Analytics course on YouTube, iTunes or Archive.org. (You can watch the complete playlist of lectures above.) And if you click here, you can get the syllabus, lectures notes, assignments, poker software, and more. Poker Theory and Analytics  will be added to our ever-growing collection, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities, in both the Business and Economics sections. Related Content: Peter Thiel’s Stanford Course on Startups: Read the Lecture Notes Free Online 150 Free Online Business Courses MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once (Free Online Course) MIT’s Introduction to Poker Theory: A Free Online Course 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/mits-introduction-to-poker-theory.html 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. The post MIT’s Introduction to Poker Theory: A Free Online Course appeared first on Open Culture.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert won’t hit the airwaves until September 8th, but Colbert is already getting his Late Show Youtube channel up and running. That’s where you will find this video breaking down NASA’s amazing flyby of Pluto last week, a journey that involved the New Horizons spacecraft traveling a staggering 3 billion miles. (See photos here.) Joining Colbert is Neil deGrasse Tyson, who needs no introduction around here. Enjoy the banter, and don’t forget that you can download Tyson’s short course, The Inexplicable Universe. It’s free from The Great Courses for a limited time. If the concept of Colbert interviewing Tyson intrigues you, don’t miss this lengthy interview originally posted on OC in 2011. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.  Related Content: Stephen Colbert Reads Ray Bradbury Classic Sci-Fi Story "The Veldt" Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers the Greatest Science Sermon Ever Free Online Astronomy Courses Stephen Colbert & Neil deGrasse Break Down Our Awesome 3 Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/stephen-colbert-neil-degrasse-break-down-our-awesome-3-billion-mile-journey-to-pluto.html 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. The post Stephen Colbert & Neil deGrasse Break Down Our Awesome 3 Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto appeared first on Open Culture.

Movie audiences love dinosaurs. Ask the makers of Jurassic World, a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s venerable franchise that raked in over $1.5 billion this year. There is something about seeing humanity’s ambitions crumble in the face of a massive, toothy lizard (or are they supposed to be a giant featherless bird now?) that just captures the imagination of the inner 5 year-old in all of us. So if you enjoyed Jurassic World, you will dig The Lost World (1925), the granddaddy of giant monster movies. Adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, the story of The Lost World should be familiar to anyone who has watched King Kong or The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The film is about an eccentric scientist, Professor Challenger (played by Wallace Beery in a Karl Marx beard), who ventures to a South American plateau deep in the heart of the Amazonian jungle where dinosaurs still exist. When he captures a Brontosaurus and lugs it back to London, the beast escapes and runs wild in the streets, smashing buildings, stomping on people and trashing cherished national landmarks. Exotic locations filled with equally exotic creatures? Check. Implicit critique of man’s hubristic ambition? Check. Way cool special effects? Check. Lost World has all the hallmarks of the genre even though it came out 90 years ago. Audiences at the time were blown away by footage of triceratops, allosauruses and stegosauruses. Though they might seem about as terrifying to today’s jaded audiences as a Gumby cartoon, they were nothing short of a revelation in the 1920s. In 1922, Conan Doyle showed clips of the movie without revealing its origins to The Society of American Magicians, an audience that included none other than Harry Houdini. The next day, The New York Times breathlessly wrote that Conan Doyle’s "monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces." In fact, the dinosaurs were the handy work of Willis O’Brien who would take his experience on this film and make the 1933 masterpiece King Kong. You can watch the full movie above. And it will be added to our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Kim Jong-il’s Godzilla Movie & His Free Writings on Film Theory 101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Watch Lost World (1925), the Granddaddy of Giant Monster Movies Like The Lost World: Jurassic Park 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/watch-lost-world-1925-the-granddaddy-of-giant-monster-movies-like-the-lost-world-jurassic-park.html 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. The post Watch Lost World (1925), the Granddaddy of Giant Monster Movies Like The Lost World: Jurassic Park appeared first on Open Culture.

So many hugely successful and talented musicians have died at age 27 that it almost seems reasonable to believe the number represents some mystical coefficient of talent and tragedy. But several decades before Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, or Amy Winehouse left us too soon, Robert Johnson—the man who pioneered selling one’s soul for rock and roll—died in 1938, at age 27, under mysterious and likely violent circumstances. He was already a legend, and his story of meeting Satan at the crossroads to make an exchange for his extraordinary talent had already permeated the popular culture of his day and became even more ingrained after his death—making him, well, maybe the very first rock star. Johnson’s few recordings—29 songs in total—went on to influence Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, 27 club member Brian Jones and so many others. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of Delta and Chicago blues guitarists who picked Johnson’s brain, or stopped short of selling their souls trying to outplay him. But Johnson, begins the animated short above (which tells the tale of the bluesman’s infernal deal) "wasn’t always such an amazing guitarist." Legend has it he "coveted the talents of Son House" and dreamed of stardom. He acquired his talent overnight, it seemed to those around him, who surmised he must have set out to the crossroads, met the devil, and "made a deal." The rest of the story—of Robert Johnson’s fatal encounter with the jealous husband of an admirer—is a more plausible development, though it too may be apocryphal. "Not all of this may be true," says the short film’s title cards, "but one thing is for certain: No Robert Johnson, No Rock and Roll." This too is another legend. Other early bluesmen like Blind Willie Johnson and Robert’s hero Son House exerted similar influence on 60s blues revivalists, as of course did later electric players like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King. Johnson was a phenomenal innovator, and a singular voice, but his repertoire—like those of most blues players at the time—consisted of variations on older songs, or responses to other, very talented musicians. Most of the songs he recorded were in this vein—with at least two very notable exceptions: "Cross Road Blues" (or just "Crossroads") and "Me and the Devil Blues," both of which have contributed to the myth of Johnson’s pact with Lucifer, including the part about the dark angel coming to collect his debt. In the latter song, animated in a video above, Satan comes knocking on the singer’s door early in the morning. "Hello Satan," says Johnson, "I believe it’s time to go." Much of what we think about Johnson’s life comes from these songs, and from much rumor and innuendo. He may have been murdered, or—like so many later stars who died too young—he may have simply burned out. One blues singer who claims she met him as a child remembers him near the end of his life as "ill" and "sickly," reports the Austin Chronicle, "in a state of physical disrepair as though he’d been roughed up." Johnson scholar Elijah Wald describes his history like that of many founders of religious sects: "So much research has been done [on Johnson] that I have to assume the overall picture is fairly accurate. Still, this picture has been pieced together from so many tattered and flimsy scraps that almost any one of them must to some extent be taken on faith." Johnson’s "spiritual descendants," as Rolling Stone’s David Fricke calls his rock and roll progeny, have no trouble doing just that. Nor do fans of rock and blues and other artists who find the Robert Johnson legend tantalizing. In the film above, "Hot Tamales," animator Riccardo Maneglia adapts the myth, and quotes from "Crossroad Blues," to tell the story of Bob, who journeys to the crossroads to meet sinister voodoo deity Papa Leg, replaying Johnson’s supposed rendezvous in a different religious context. In "Crossroad"‘s lyrics, Johnson is actually "pleading with God for mercy," writes Frank DiGiacomo in Vanity Fair, "not bargaining with the devil." Nonetheless—legendary or not—his evocation of devilish deals in "Me and the Devil Blues" and gritty, emotional account of self-destruction in "Crossroads" may on their own add sufficient weight to that far-reaching idea: "No Robert Johnson, No Rock and Roll." Related Content: B.B. King Explains in an Animated Video Whether You Need to Endure Hardship to Play the Blues Keith Richards Waxes Philosophical, Plays Live with His Idol, the Great Muddy Waters Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’ Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. The Story of Bluesman Robert Johnson’s Famous Deal With the Devil Retold in Three Animations 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-story-of-bluesman-robert-johnsons-famous-deal-with-the-devil-retold-in-three-animations.html 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. The post The Story of Bluesman Robert Johnson’s Famous Deal With the Devil Retold in Three Animations appeared first on Open Culture.

How to take photographs like Ansel Adams did? The question dogs many who’ve recently picked up the camera, especially those directly inspired to do so by he whose black-and-white landscapes practically defined the American West for the 20th century. Conveniently, though, Adams left behind much to study, and not just his considerable body of work; he also spoke without hesitation about the techniques he developed and employed, and even further explained them in books like Making a Photograph; Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach; and Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, the closest thing we have to a master class with the man. Adams got particular results out of a procedure he called "visualization," in which the photographer "sees" the final image as fully as possible in their imagination before attempting to capture that image on film in the real world. In the two clips featured here, you can hear Adams himself discuss visualization. "When you visualize a photograph, it is not only a matter of seeing it in the mind’s eye," he says in the video from the Getty Museum, "but it’s also, and primarily, a matter of feeling it." In the interview just above, he adds that "the picture has to be there clearly and decisively, and if you have enough craft in your own work and in your practice, you can then make the photograph you desire." Here, Adams outlines "the steps in making a photograph" in a bit more detail as follows: Need, or desire, to photograph. This attitude is obviously essential. Sometimes just going out with a camera can excite perceptive interest and the desire to work. An assignment—a purpose—can be the greatest stimulus for functional or creative work. Discovery of the subject, or recognition of its essential aspects, will evoke the concept of the image. This leads to the exploration of the subject and the optimum point of view. Visualization of the final picture is essential in whatever medium is used. The term "seeing" can be used for visualization, but the latter term is more precise in that it relates to the final picture—its scale, composition, tonal and textural values, etc. Just as a musician "hears" notes and chords in his mind’s eye, so can the trained photographer "see" certain values, textures, and arrangements in his mind’s eye. For more information still on Adams’ artistic process, see also Ansel Adams, Photographer, the 1958 documentary we featured here in 2013. None of this material, of course, guarantees you the ability to take photographs exactly like Ansel Adams, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to: we do our best work, after all, not when we do exactly what our greatest predecessors did, but when we think how our greatest predecessors thought. Hence the importance of visualization, which you can do right now without buying the exact model of Zeiss Milliflex Adams used or going to the exact spots in Yosemite from which he shot — you only need to think. Related Content: Ansel Adams Reveals His Creative Process in 1958 Documentary Discover Ansel Adams’ 226 Photos of U.S. National Parks (and Another Side of the Legendary Photographer) Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye, a Revealing Look at "The Father of Modern Photography" 1972 Diane Arbus Documentary Interviews Those Who Knew the American Photographer Best Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Decisive Moment Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. How to Take Photographs Like Ansel Adams: The Master Explains The Art of "Visualization" 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/how-to-take-photographs-like-ansel-adams.html 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. The post How to Take Photographs Like Ansel Adams: The Master Explains The Art of "Visualization" appeared first on Open Culture.

At Creative Commons, a lot of the work we do to support the commons is in the background. We write and steward copyright licenses that help fuel the open web. We help push through open policies at the government, university, and foundation level to increase access to academic, scientific, cultural and other types of content. We fight for sensible copyright reform. All of this work is important, and we’re going to continue to do it. But we also want to try our hand at something more visible. Our plan is to spend the next year collaboratively researching and writing a book about business models that involve Creative Commons licensing. Even our funding strategy for this project is public-facing and collaborative. Last week we launched our first-ever Kickstarter to raise money for the project, and we hope you’ll become a part of it all by making a pledge at any amount. Crowdfunding this project is a way to kick off the project in an open and visible way, and to gather support and excitement for our work. But it is also a way to get first-hand experience with a business model that involves Creative Commons. As we raise funds to support the development of a book we will ultimately give away for free under a CC license, we are a case study for our own book. We’re off to a strong start and we’re learning as we go. And we’re going to do it entirely in the open. We’ve started a Medium publication called "Made with Creative Commons" to use as our digital whiteboard. Throughout the year, we’ll be writing there about the things we learn, the questions we have, the problems we face. We’re hoping to make the research and writing process as collaborative as possible. Kickstarter backers can also become co-creators of the book to receive early drafts of our writing as we go and provide input to help shape the book. We’re really excited about this ambitious project. Creating and sharing is what CC is all about, and as we do it, we’re hoping to reveal strategies that other creators and businesses can use for their own work. We hope you’ll join us! -Sarah Hinchliff Pearson is Senior Counsel at Creative Commons.

At Biloxi Junior High School, the teachers are spending their summer pretty productively. They’re taking an entire hallway lined with dull green (currently unused) lockers and they’re repainting each and everyone of them — 189 in total. By the time students return in the fall, each locker will look like the spine of a famous book, and the hallway will be known as the "Avenue of Literature." One teacher told WLOX, "We want students to come back to school in August and … be absolutely amazed with what we’ve done and be curious. We want that to be the spark for reading in our classrooms… We’re hoping the students come and they become completely immersed in a collection" that contains everything from Watership Down and Johnny Tremain to books in the Twilight series, reports Electric Lit. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. School Teachers Turn Old Lockers Into Literary Works of 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/school-teachers-turn-old-lockers-into-literary-works-of-art.html 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. The post School Teachers Turn Old Lockers Into Literary Works of Art appeared first on Open Culture.

We here at Open Culture believe that, as far as science-fiction delivery systems go, you can’t do much better than radio drama. We’ve previously featured quite a range of it, from the classic 1950s series Dimension X and its successor X Minus One to adaptations of such classic works as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and, most recently, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Now we’ve opened up another treasure trove of sci-fi radio in the form of the archives of Mind Webs, originally broadcast on Madison, Wisconsin’s WHA-AM, starting in the 1970s. One old-time radio site describes Mind Webs as "not really audio drama in the strict sense of the definition," but "readings of science fiction stories by some of the genre’s best writers [ … ] enhanced by music, periodic sound cues, and the occasional character voice." As the collector who made his recordings of the series available to the Internet Archive puts it, Mind Webs "stands as a testament to not only some of our greatest speculative fiction authors, but just how well simple dialog and music minus major sound effects can convey stories so well." Which authors counted as great enough for inclusion into the Mind Webs canon? Some of the names, like Ursula K. LeGuin, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, you’d expect to find in this archive, but others go farther afield: the series also features stories by the likes of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, H.P. Lovecraft — writers who, each in their own way, bent the boundaries of all known fiction, science- or otherwise — and even such supposedly traditional storytellers as John Cheever and Roald Dahl who, in these selections, put their own spin on reality. Listen to enough episodes of Mind Webs, and you may get hooked on the voice and reading style of its host Michael Hanson, a fixture on Wisconsin public radio for something like forty years. Back in 2001, just after wrapping up his career in that sector, Hanson wrote in to the New York Times lamenting the state of public radio, especially its program directors turned into "sycophantic bean counters" and a "pronounced dumbing down of program content." Mind Webs, which kept on going from the 70s through the 90s, came from a time before all that, and now its smart storytelling has come available for all of us to enjoy. The playlist above will let you stream all of the stories — roughly 88 hours worth — from start to finish. Or you can access the audio at Archive.org here. Related Content: Hear Inventive Stories from Ursula Le Guin & J.G. Ballard Turned Into CBC Radio Dramas Hear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956-57) Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Pioneering Sci-Fi Novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, as a BBC Radio Play Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More X Minus One: More Classic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury & Dick Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Listen to 188 Dramatized Science Fiction Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard & More 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/188-dramatized-science-fiction-stories.html 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. The post Listen to 188 Dramatized Science Fiction Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard & More appeared first on Open Culture.

Cast your mind back to 1979, a time before Internet radio, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks beginning with the letter T. And now imagine that you’d never heard the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Blondie, Roxy Music, hell, even Bruce Springsteen—all of whom were just beginning to break through to mainstream consciousness. Now imagine your introduction to these artists comes from none other than Ziggy Stardust himself—or the Thin White Duke—David Bowie, immersed in his Berlin period and recording a trilogy of albums that together arguably represent the best work of his career. That would be something, wouldn’t it? Perhaps some of you don’t have to imagine. If you had tuned into BBC Radio One on May, 20 of that year, you would have heard David Bowie DJ his own two hour show, "Star Special," playing his favorite records and jovially chatting up his audience. "There are some famous names here," says an announcer introducing Bowie’s show, "some you’ve never heard of before." Bowie laughs at his own jokes, and obviously takes great pleasure in sharing so many then-obscure artists. "You can hear that deep need to show," writes Dangerous Minds, "to bring listeners something new, in every word Bowie utters." He doesn’t mind bringing them his own new stuff either, playing "Boys Keep Swinging" and "Yassassin" from that year’s Lodger. Track listing The Doors, "Love Street" Iggy Pop, "TV Eye" John Lennon, "Remember" ? & The Mysterians, "96 Tears" Edward Elgar, "The Nursery Suite" (extract) Danny Kaye, "Inchworm" Philip Glass, "Trial Prison" The Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane" Mars, "Helen Fordsdale" Little Richard, "He’s My Star" King Crimson, "21st Century Schizoid Man" Talking Heads, "Warning Sign" Jeff Beck, "Beck’s Bolero" Ronnie Spector, "Try Some, Buy Some" Marc Bolan, "20th Century Boy" The Mekons, "Where Were You?" Steve Forbert, "Big City Cat" The Rolling Stones, "We Love You" Roxy Music, "2HB" Bruce Springsteen, "It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City" Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips" Blondie, "Rip Her To Shreds" Bob Seger, "Beautiful Loser" David Bowie, "Boys Keep Swinging" David Bowie, "Yassassin" Talking Heads, "Book I Read" Roxy Music, "For Your Pleasure" King Curtis, "Something On Your Mind" The Staple Singers, "Lies" See a complete playlist of Bowie’s "Star Special" above, and hear the entire show at the top of the post. It’s a great listen even with the benefit of hindsight, but if you can put yourself in the place of someone who’d never heard Lou Reed mumble and moan his way through "Sweet Jane"—or for that matter never heard the still-obscure experimental punk band Mars—it’s even better. For other excellent examples of British rock stars as radio tastemakers, hear the Sex Pistols’ John Lydon introduce an audience to Can, King Tubby, Nico, Captain Beefheart, and more in this 1977 Capital Radio interview. (Lydon says he loves "Rebel Rebel," but thinks Bowie is "a real bad drag queen.") And don’t miss Joe Strummer’s eclectic 8-episode BBC Radio Show "London Calling" from 1998/2001. via John Coulthart/Metafilter/Dangerous Minds Related Content: David Bowie’s Top 100 Books David Bowie Releases Vintage Videos of His Greatest Hits from the 1970s and 1980s "Joe Strummer’s London Calling": All 8 Episodes of Strummer’s UK Radio Show Free Online Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/david-bowie-becomes-a-dj-on-bbc-radio-in-1979.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

During these summer months, we’ve been busy rummaging around the internet and adding new courses to our big list of Free Online Courses, which now features 1,150 courses from top universities. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Harvard. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime, anywhere, on your computer or smart phone. We didn’t do a precise calculation, but there’s probably about 35,000 hours of free audio & video lectures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time. Right now you’ll find 133 free philosophy courses, 85 free history courses, 120 free computer science courses, 71 free physics courses and 55 Free Literature Courses in the collection, and that’s just beginning to scratch the surface. You can peruse sections covering Astronomy, Biology, Business, Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Math, Political Science, Psychology and Religion. Here are some highlights from the complete list of Free Online Courses. We’ve added a few unconventional/vintage courses in the mix just to keep things interesting. A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners - Free iTunes Video - Free Online Video - Free Online Audio - Marianne Talbot, Oxford University Against All Odds: Inside Statistics - Free Online Video - Pardis Sabeti, Harvard Ancient Greek History - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Audio - Free iTunes Video - Course Materials - Donald Kagan, Yale Creative Reading and Writing - William S. Burroughs - Free Online Audio - Naropa University Critical Reasoning for Beginners - Free iTunes Video - Free iTunes Audio - Free Online Video & Audio - Marianne Talbot, Oxford Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift - Free iTunes Video - Paul Hegarty, Stanford Edible Education 101 (Spring 2014) - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Video - Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley Financial Markets - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Audio - Free iTunes Video - Course Materials - Robert Shiller, Yale Growing Up in the Universe - Free Online Video - Richard Dawkins, Oxford The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science - Free Online Video - Harvard/Smithsonian Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science - Various Formats - David Malan, Harvard Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Audio - Course Materials - Wai Chee Dimock, Yale Heidegger’s Being & Time - Free iTunes Audio - Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley Human Behavioral Biology - Free iTunes Video - Free Online Video - Robert Sapolsky, Stanford Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) - Free Online Video - Christine Hayes, Yale. Introduction to Visual Studies - Free iTunes iOS App - Anna Divinsky, Penn State Invitation to World Literature - Free Online Video - David Damrosch, Harvard Philosophy of Language - Free iTunes Audio - John Searle, UC Berkeley Physics for Future Presidents - Free Online Video - Richard Muller, UC Berkeley Quantum Electrodynamics - Free Online Video - Richard Feynman, Presented at University of Auckland Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Video - Course Info - Team taught, Harvard Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays - Free Online Video - Marjorie Garber, Harvard Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Free Online Video & Course Info - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Video - MIT, Dr. Paola Rebusco The American Novel Since 1945 - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Audio - Free iTunes Video - Download Course - Amy Hungerford, Yale The Central Philosophy of Tibet - Free Online Audio - Robert Thurman, Columbia University The Character of Physical Law (1964) - Free Online Video - Richard Feynman, Cornell The Hobbit - Free iTunes Video - Free Online Audio - More - Corey Olsen, Washington College The Tempest - Free Online Audio - Allen Gisnberg, Naropa Walter Kaufmann Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre - Free Online Audio The complete list of courses can be accessed here: 1,200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Related Content: 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/a-master-list-of-1200-free-courses-from-top-universities-35000-hours-of-audiovideo-lectures.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Last week, we featured a trio of ridiculously cute commercials about a cat called Konyara. The company that made them was none other that Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki’s animation shop. Those commercials, drawn in an elegantly simple style that recalls traditional Japanese sumi-e illustrations, had the same meticulous attention to detail and fluid movements that are Miyazaki’s trademark. As it turns out, Ghibli didn’t restrict its commercial endeavors to cartoon cats. Above are a bunch of commercials the company did over the years stretching all the way back to 1992. The ads range from ones about bread to banks to green tea. There are also quite a number of tie-ins from the studio’s movies, like an ad for Lawson’s convenience stores that features collectible dolls from Spirited Away. What is fascinating about these ads is the range of styles they exhibit. Many are done in a way that clearly recalls Miyazaki’s movies, others look much more minimal and much more gestural. In other Miyazaki related news, it turns out that the master isn’t retiring after all. Following the release of his feature The Wind Rises in 2013, Hayao Miyazaki announced he was getting out of the animation biz. But as with his numerous declarations of retirement in the past, it didn’t take. Miyazaki is reportedly making a 10-minute long animated short called Kemushi no Boro (Boro the Caterpillar). The director describes the short as "a story of a tiny, hairy caterpillar, so tiny that it may be easily squished between your fingers." He has been developing on the idea for a couple decades now and, in spite of the short’s length, the film is projected to take three years to make. What might be surprising is that the film will be entirely computer generated. Miyazaki is perhaps the world’s most famous proponent of hand-drawn cel animation. As a younger man, he railed against CGI calling the method "shallow, fake." Over the years, however, his feelings evolved. "If [hand-drawn cel animation] is a dying craft we can’t do anything about it," he told The Guardian back in 2005. "Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? […] Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do. But it is far too late for me to try it." Apparently it is not. Boro will screen exclusively in his Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, so if you want to see the master’s next work, be prepared to fly to Japan. Related Content: The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki How to Make Instant Ramen Compliments of Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyazaki French Student Sets Internet on Fire with Animation Inspired by Moebius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyazaki Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-delightful-tv-ads-directed-by-hayao-miyazaki-other-studio-ghibli-animators-1992-2015.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

You may recall our posting last year of Jorge Luis Borges’ review of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane — surely one of the most Open Culture-worthy intersections of 20th century luminaries ever to occur. Borges described Welles’ masterwork as possessed of one side that, "pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits," and another, a "kind of metaphysical detective story" whose "subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined." On the whole, the author of Labyrinths called the picture "not intelligent, though it is the work of genius." Not long after our post, the Paris Review‘s Dan Piepenbring wrote one that also quoted another, later review of Citizen Kane by none other than Jean-Paul Sartre: Kane might have been interesting for the Americans, [but] it is completely passé for us, because the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about. The film is in the past tense, whereas we all know that cinema has got to be in the present tense. ‘I am the man who is kissing, I am the girl who is being kissed, I am the Indian who is being pursued, I am the man pursuing the Indian.’ And film in the past tense is the antithesis of cinema. Therefore Citizen Kane is not cinema. The 1945 review originally ran in high-minded film journal L’Écran français under the headline "Quand Hollywood veut faire penser … Citizen Kane d’Orson Welles," or, "When Hollywood Wants to Make Us Think … Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane." According to The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre: A Bibliographical Life, "in re-reading this [review], which he did not remember at all, Sartre hardly recognized his style and expressed some doubt about the authenticity of his signature. On the other hand, he did find in it the ideas Citizen Kane suggested to him when he first saw it in the United States. After he saw the film again in France, Sartre had a slightly more favorable opinion of it, but he still thinks it is undoubtedly no masterpiece." But at the time, writes Simon Leys, "the impact of this condemnation was devastating. The Magnificent Ambersons was shown soon afterwards in Paris but failed miserably. The cultivated public always follows the directives of a few propaganda commissars: there is much more conformity among intellectuals than among plumbers or car mechanics." Or at least the cultivated public did so in 1940s Paris; the mechanics of culture have changed somewhat since then, but as far as Citizen Kane goes, high-profile opinions about it have grown only more positive over time. Sure, Vertigo recently knocked it down a peg in the Sight and Sound poll, but that just makes me wonder what Sartre thought of Hitchcock’s masterwork — a film that might have had a resonance or two in the mind of an existentialist. Related Content: Jorge Luis Borges, Film Critic, Reviews Citizen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was His Major "Gift" to Citizen Kane Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: "It Was Monstrous!" Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intellectuals Human, All Too Human: 3-Part Documentary Profiles Nietzsche, Heidegger & Sartre Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life Download Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Modern Thought (1960) Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/citizen-kane-is-not-cinema-jean-paul-sartre-reviews-orson-welles-masterwork-1945.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Both Faulkner and the physicists may be right: the passage of time is an illusion. And yet, for as long as we’ve been keeping score, it’s seemed that history really exists, in increasingly distant forms the further back we look. As Jonathan Crow wrote in a recent post on news service British Pathé’s release of 85,000 pieces of archival film on YouTube, seeing documentary evidence of just the last century "really makes the past feel like a foreign country—the weird hairstyles, the way a city street looked, the breathtakingly casual sexism and racism." (Of course there’s more than enough reason to think future generations will say the same of us.) British Pathé’s archive seems exhaustive—until you see the latest digitized collection on YouTube from AP and British Movietone, which spans from 1895 to the present and brings us thousands more past tragedies, triumphs, and hairstyles This release of "more than 1 million minutes" of news, writes Variety, includes archival footage of "major world events such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, exclusive footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S." And so much more, such as the newsreel above, which depicts Berlin in 1945, eventually getting around to documenting the Potsdam Conference (at 3:55), where Churchill, Stalin, and Truman created the 17th parallel in Vietnam, dictated the terms of the German occupation, and planned the coming Japanese surrender. No one at the time could have accurately foreseen the historical reverberations of these actions. Another strange, even uncanny piece of film shows us the English football team giving the Nazi salute in 1938 at the commencement of a game against Germany. "That’s shocking now," says Alwyn Lindsay, the director of AP’s international archive, "but it wasn’t at the time." Films like these have become of much more interest since The Sun published photographs of the royal family—including a young Queen Elizabeth II and her uncle Prince (later King, then Duke) Edward VIII—giving Nazi salutes in 1933. Though it was not particularly controversial, and the children of course had little idea what it signified, it did turn out that Edward (seen here) was a would-be Nazi collaborator and remained an unapologetic sympathizer. This huge video trove doesn’t just document the grim history of the Second World War, of course. As you can see in the AP’s introductory montage at the top of the post, there is "a world of history at your fingertips"—from triumphant video like Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, above, to the below film of "Crazy 60s Hats in Glorious Colour." And more or less every other major world event, disaster, discovery, or widespread trend you might name from the last 120 or so years. The archive splits into two YouTube channels: AP offers both historical and up-to-the-minute political, sports, celebrity, science, and "weird and wacky" videos (with "new content every day"). The British Movietone channel is solely historical, with much of its content coming from the 1960s (like those hats, and this video of the Beatles receiving their MBE’s, and other "Beatlemania scenes.") Movietone’s one nod to the present takes the form of "The Archivist Presents," in which a historian offers quirky context on some bit of archival footage, like that above of the Kinks getting their hair curled. The completely unironic lounge music and casually sexist narration will make you both smile and wince, as do Ray Davies and company when they see their new hair. Most of the films in this million minutes of news footage (and counting) tend to elicit either or both of these two emotional reactions—joy (or amusement) or mild to intense horror, and watching them makes the past they show us feel paradoxically more strange and more immediate at once. Related Content: Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube New Archive Makes Available 800,000 Pages Documenting the History of Film, Television & Radio 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.  Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/1000000-minutes-of-newsreel-footage-by-ap-british-movietone-released-on-youtube.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Before Netflix killed Blockbuster, Blockbuster killed the mom and pop video store. Maybe you had your favorite ma and pa shop, where under the surface of new releases you’d find the quirky, curated selections that reflected the mind of the owner. When Allen Ginsberg lived in New York’s East Village, it was Kim’s Video, opened in 1987 by Yongman Kim. With so many artists frequenting its St. Marks Place location, Kim asked its more famous customers to share their lists of top ten favorite films. Ginsberg obliged. And you can now find his top 10 list online (in two parts: Part 1 - Part 2) thanks to The Allen Ginsberg Project. Ginsberg’s oldest choice is Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin, which you can watch above. One must wonder if it was the very poetic editing that drew Ginsberg to the film, or something else, perhaps, maybe the film’s revolutionary nature? Many of Ginsberg’s choices reflect his interest in poetic realism, the French film movement that combined stories of real folks with sometimes very impressionist camera work. Three of its most famous proponents, Julian Duvivier, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné appear on the Ginsberg list. Julian Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) is set in that most wonderful location for the Beat poets, Tangiers, and inspired Graham Greene to write The Third Man. Marcel Carné’s classic Children of Paradise (1945) makes the list, as does his 1938 film noir Port of Shadows. Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, which still tops many top 10 film lists today, is here too. Another Frenchman, Jean Cocteau gets on the list twice, with two films from his Orphic trilogy, The Blood of a Poet (1930) and Orpheé (1950). The mix of the dreamlike and the erotic make a perfect choice for the poet. Ginsberg saves space for Beat cinema, a lot of which is still not on DVD. Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960) is often called one of the main films of the Beat Generation, a largely improvised, low budget film about the artists and writers of San Francisco. It sadly remains unavailable on DVD, and one wonders if the film was even available at Kim’s, as it doesn’t appear to be on VHS either. More available are his final two choices, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), which was named after (and executed in a style similar to) an Exquisite Corpse-style poem written by Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neil Cassady in the late ‘40s. Also largely improvised, the film involves bohemian party crashers who make life complicated for a man and wife trying to impress a respectable bishop who’s come for dinner. Lastly, Ginsberg names Harry Smith’s visionary cut-up animation masterpiece Heaven and Earth Magic (1957 - 1962), which you can see above. Smith was not just a superb filmmaker, but a great influence on the Beats through his interest in psychedelics and mysticism, as well as the man behind the American Anthology of Folk Music on Folkways records. A great friend of Ginsberg, Harry Smith gets the final tip of the hat. via The Allen Ginsberg Project Related Content: 13 Lectures from Allen Ginsberg’s "History of Poetry" Course (1975) The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading "Howl" (1956) Rare Footage of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac & Other Beats Hanging Out in the East Village (1959) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/allen-ginsbergs-top-10-favorite-films.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

For years, it was hard to come across Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973, Haruki Murakami’s first and second novels, unless one wanted to pony up something between $250 and $400 at Amazon for their Kodansha English editions. The author has long dismissed them as juvenilia, though he was far from a juvenile at that time, and was actually managing a jazz bar on the outskirts of Tokyo with his wife and writing his first works at their kitchen table. He was searching for a style as a novelist, and it was once he wrote A Wild Sheep Chase that Murakami became the writer he envisioned. On August 4, Knopf will publish both novels in a single volume with new translations by Ted Goossen, so readers can make up their own minds on whether Murakami is being too hard on himself. A lot of the familiar Murakami elements and themes are there: a nameless narrator who likes his beer and smokes, cats, music, literature, spaghetti, mysterious appearances and disappearances, loneliness, and his poetic observations of nature. Now that Murakami has relented on the book’s publication, he has penned an introduction that explores the beginning of his writing career, chance decisions, his sometimes blind search for a style, and the baseball game that changed his life: I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel. I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium. After the game (Yakult won as I recall), I took the train to Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of writing paper and a fountain pen. Word processors and computers weren’t around back then, which meant we had to write everything by hand, one character at a time. The sensation of writing felt very fresh. I remember how thrilled I was. It had been such a long time since I had put fountain pen to paper. Each night after that, when I got home late from work, I sat at my kitchen table and wrote. Those few hours before dawn were practically the only time I had free. Over the six or so months that followed I wrote Hear the Wind Sing. I wrapped up the first draft right around the time the baseball season ended. Incidentally, that year the Yakult Swallows bucked the odds and almost everyone’s predictions to win the Central League pennant, then went on to defeat the Pacific League champions, the pitching-rich Hankyu Braves in the Japan Series. It was truly a miraculous season that sent the hearts of all Yakult fans soaring. You can read the rest of Murakami’s introduction over at Lithub. And pre-order the new translation of Wind/Pinball here. Related Content: A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Haruki Murakami Reads in English from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in a Rare Public Reading (1998) Discover Haruki Murakami’s Advertorial Short Stories: Rare Short-Short Fiction from the 1980s A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/read-online-haruki-murakamis-new-essay-on-how-a-baseball-game-launched-his-writing-career.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Patreon, a crowd funding site where fans can automatically tithe a set amount to their fave artist every time that person uploads content, is a great way for passionate, under-recognized individuals to gain visibility and a bit of dough. So what’s astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doing there? He’s already famous, and one would think his gig as director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, coupled with the proceeds from his books and dvds, would prove sufficient to any financial needs. (Is it some sort of Amanda Palmer thing?) Nope. Turns out Dr. Tyson is there on someone else’s behalf, narrating an episode of Harry Reich’s Minute Physics. The video series often employs whiteboard animations to explain such scientific phenomena as dark matter, wave/particle duality, and bicycles. The latest Tyson-narrated episode, above, shoots the moon by cramming the entire History of the Universe (and some complimentary Stravinsky) into an 8.5-minute framework (a negligible amount when you consider phenomena like light years, but still many times the series’ standard minute). Thus far, 1075 fans of Minute Physics have anted up, resulting in a take of $2,992.66 per video. (Click here to see how that amount compares to the various wages and salaries of Dr. Tyson’s coworkers at the American Museum of Natural History…it’s clear Reich devotes a lot of labor to every episode.) If you’re feeling flush (or nervous about the upcoming school year), you can join these 1075 fans, earning admission to a supporters-only activity feed where you can ask questions, watch outtakes, preview upcoming attractions, and possibly even get your name in the credits. Related Content: Stephen Colbert & Neil deGrasse Break Down Our Awesome 3 Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Neil deGrasse Tyson Talks Asteroid Physics & "Non Newtonian Solids" with Inspiring 9-Year-Old Student Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio Show Podcast Tackles the History of Video Games Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/neil-degrasse-tyson-presents-a-brief-history-of-everything-in-an-8-5-minute-animation.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Of all the various types of professional explainers out there, none may come across as more clueless than the television news reporter faced with a minority youth culture and trying to account for its existence—one he or she had previously been unaware of. Every description gets reduced to the broadest of judgements, easy stereotypes fill in for appreciation. The larger the media outlet, the more these tendencies seem to manifest; in fact a string of such sensualized reportage put together seems to constitute both the rise and the fall of a corporate news career. All of the above should prepare you for what you are about to see in ABC’s 20/20 special "Rappin’ to the Beat" from 1981. Investigative reporter Steve Fox journeys into the world of rap music, a form—his condescending co-anchor tells us in a back-handed remark—"so compelling, you’ll never miss the fact there’s no melody." "It’s a music that is all beat," he says, "strong beat, and talk." With the tone established, enter Fox to tell us that Blondie’s "Rapture" is the main reason rap caught on. It only gets worse. I suppose you could blame Debbie Harry, but she didn’t ask to be the first voice of rap we hear in a 20/20 special. That decision was the special purview of "Rappin’ to the Beat"’s producers. But like all archival film and video of emerging creative movements, these clips redeem themselves with footage of the scene’s pioneers, including a performance from a 22-year-old Kurtis Blow and some early breakdancing—or, as one NYC Transit cop calls it, a riot. The second part, above, gives us some insightful commentary from NYC radio DJ Pablo Guzman, folklorist John Szwed (who wrote the definitive biography of Sun Ra), and syndicated rock columnist Lisa Robinson, who reminds us of how "very black and very urban" rap is, then goes on to say, "people hated rock and roll 15 years ago." It’s certainly true that 15 years or so after this clumsy attempt at capturing the moment, rap and hip-hop became ubiquitous—at a time when punk rock also hit the suburbs. Punk also had its 20/20 moment in the late 70s (above); it symbolized, the announcer tells us, "the dreadful possibility of riot which has always seemed to cling to rock and roll." Metal got the Geraldo treatment in "Heavy Metal Moms"—the examples abound. Which of them is more banal, condescending, or just painfully awkward is impossible to say, but they make fascinating windows onto the media’s consistently weirded-out response to outsiders they can’t ignore. As a counterpoint, check out the way Fred Rogers welcomed to his show a 12-year-old breakdancer or a couple of experimental electronic musicians, making no effort to be cool, knowledgeable, or detached, only kind and curious. It’s just my opinion, but I always thought TV news needed more Mr. Rogers and less…. whatever the journalistic approach in "Rappin’ to the Beat" is supposed to be. via Mental Floss Related Content: The "Amen Break": The Most Famous 6-Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sampling Revolution Fight For Your Right Revisited: Adam Yauch’s 2011 Film Commemorates the Beastie Boys’ Legendary Music Video Mr. Rogers Takes Breakdancing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/abc-news-program-2020-introduces-america-to-rap-music-in-a-painfully-awkward-way-1981.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

Experimental music, by its very nature, stays out of the mainstream. All styles of music begin as experiments, but most sooner or later, in one form or another, find their way to popular acceptance. But if one living musician personifies the intriguing borderlands between the popular and the experimental, Björk does: since at least the 1980s (and, technically, the 1970s), she has steadily put out records that constitute master classes in how to keep pushing forms forward while maintaining a wide fan base, seemingly giving the lie to John Cage’s dictum that making something 20 percent new means a loss of 80 percent of the audience. Cage, an icon of minimalist experimental music who still caught the public ear now and again, doesn’t appear in the BBC’s Modern Minimalists [part one, part two], but only because he died in 1992, five years before it aired. But this Björk-hosted whirlwind tour through the company of a selection of innovative minimalist composers of the day actually feels, at points, a bit like Cage’s 1960 performance of Water Walk on I’ve Got a Secret: we not only hear them talk, but we hear their music, see them make it, and get an insight into the way they work and — perhaps most importantly — the way they think. "When I was asked to do this program," Björk says in her distinctive Icelandic inflection, "it was very important for me to introduce the people I think are changing music today." That roster includes Alasdair Malloy from Scotland, Mika Vainio from Finland, and, most famously, Arvo Pärt from Estonia. Björk not only draws out their musical philosophies, but responds with a few of her own. "People have moved away from plots and structures, and moved to its complete opposite, which is textures," she says over a series of postmodern landscapes, "A place to live in, or an environment, or a stillness." And the role of the musician in that modern reality? "To take these everyday noises that are ugly, and make them beautiful. By this, they’re doing magic." via Network Awesome Related Content: Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mushroom Death Suit to the Virtual Choir Hear the Album Björk Recorded as an 11-Year-Old: Features Cover Art Provided By Her Mom (1977) A Young Björk Deconstructs (Physically & Theoretically) a Television in a Delightful Retro Video Björk and Sir David Attenborough Team Up in a New Documentary About Music and Technology John Cage Performs Water Walk on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960) Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/bjork-introduces-groundbreaking-experimental-musicians-on-the-bbcs-modern-minimalists-1997.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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 happens when the Prince of Darkness covers the King of Pop? Miles Davis’ decision to record a studio version of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit, "Human Nature," caused Al Foster, his friend and drummer, to walk out mid-session, thus putting an end to their longtime collaboration. Davis chalked it up to Foster’s unwillingness to "play that funky backbeat," and brought in his nephew, Vince Wilburn, Jr., to finish the job. Foster must’ve really hated that song. Say what you will, "Human Nature" is-like most Jackson hits-an ear worm. Depending on who you talk to, Davis’ studio track, above, is a either a straightforward homage in which his horn recreates "Jackson’s breathy intimacy" or "flat, schmaltzy elevator music." People’s feelings for it tend to echo their response to Jackson’s original, to which Davis cleaved pretty closely. "Human Nature" was written by Toto’s keyboardist Steve Porcaro, the son of a jazz musician who idolized Davis. He was understandably honored that his dad’s hero chose to cover his work along with Cyndi Lauper’s "Time after Time," on 1985’s You’re Under Arrest, one of the prolific artist’s final albums. Davis’ association no doubt contributes to the tune’s ongoing popularity. Those who want to compare and contrast, can take their pick of reggae, hip-hop, electronica and funked up New Orleans brass versions. But back to "Human Nature" as rendered by Miles Davis. Most critics prefer the live version, below, captured July 7, 1988, at Montreux. Slate’s Fred Kaplan described it as "an upbeat rouser" through which Davis "prances." As Davis himself explained in a 1985 interview with Richard Cook: On a song like "Human Nature," you have to play the right thing. And the right thing is around the melody. I learned that stuff from Coleman Hawkins. Coleman could play a melody, get ad-libs, run the chords - and you still heard the melody. I play "Human Nature," varies every night. After I play the melody, that tag on the end is mine to have fun with. It’s in another key … uh, D natural. Move up a step or so to F natural. Then you can play it any way you want to. Another remark from the same interview proved prescient: You don’t have to do like Wynton Marsalis and play "Stardust "and that shit… Why can’t "Human Nature" be a standard? It fits. A standard fits like a thoroughbred. The melody and everything is just right, and every time you hear it you want to hear it some more. And you leave enough of it to know what you want to hear again. When you hear it again, the same feeling comes over you.  Related Content: The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead in 1970: Hear the Complete Recordings Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and "That Sorry-Ass Cat" Steve Miller at The Fillmore East (1970) Watch Miles Davis Improvise Music for Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/miles-davis-covers-michael-jacksons-human-nature-1983.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.

"You can’t have Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as your favorite composers," said conductor and San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas. "They simply define what music is!" True enough, though it doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone from, when asked to name their classical music of choice, unhesitatingly respond with the names of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart — and Mozart most often. So why does the man who composed, among other works, the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, and Don Giovanni still command such instinctive allegiance nearly 225 years after his death? "Mozart did not come from nowhere," writes New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. "He was the product of a society that was avid for music on every level, that believed in the possibility of an all-encompassing musical genius. The society we live in now believes otherwise; we divide music into subcultures and subgenres, we separate classical music from popular music, we locate genius in the past." But as past geniuses go, we’ve picked a good one in Mozart to carry forward with us into our technological age: the kind of age where you can listen to an 18th-century composer’s collected works with the simple click of a mouse. The simple click of a mouse, that is, onto this Spotify playlist of the complete Chronological Mozart, brought to you by the same folks who put together the playlists we’ve previously featured of 68 hours of Shakespeare and the classical music in Stanley Kubrick’s films. (If you don’t yet have the free software needed to listen, download it here.) A few tracks have vanished since the playlist’s creation (such are the vicissitudes of Spotify) but it still offers about 127 hours of the (mostly) complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the aforementioned famous pieces and well beyond. Listen and you’ll not only understand why Mozart defines what music is, but — apologies to Michael Tilson Thomas — why you, too, should number him among your favorites. Related Content: Leck Mich Im Arsch ("Kiss My Ass"): Listen to Mozart’s Scatological Canon in B Flat (1782) German String Quartet Performs Vivaldi & Mozart in Delightfully Comical & Acrobatic Routine Newly Discovered Piece by Mozart Performed on His Own Fortepiano Read an 18th-Century Eyewitness Account of 8-Year-Old Mozart’s Extraordinary Musical Skills The Recycled Orchestra: Paraguayan Youth Play Mozart with Instruments Cleverly Made Out of Trash The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/hear-all-of-mozart-in-a-free-127-hour-playlist.html 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. %%POST_LINK%% 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.