What’s your favorite color? A simple question, sure — the very first one many of us learn to ask — but one to consider seriously if you see a future for yourself in filmmaking. Earlier this year, we featured video studies on the use of the color red by Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick. Yasujiro Ozu, as Jonathan Crow points out in that post, "made the jump to color movies very reluctantly late in his career and promptly became obsessed with the color red," and a teakettle of that color even became his visual signature. No less an auteur than Krzysztof Kieślowski made not just a picture called Red, but another called Blue and another called White, which together form the acclaimed "Three Colors" trilogy. Jean-Luc Godard, never one to be outdone, has also made vivid use throughout his career of not just red but white and blue as well. The video above, "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge - A Godard Supercut," compiles three minutes of such colorful moments from the Godard filmography, drawing from his works A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, and Made in U.S.A., all of which did much to define 1960s world cinema, capturing with their vivid colors performances by Godardian icons Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge" comes from Cinema Sem Lei, the source of another aesthetically driven video essay we’ve previously featured on how German Expressionism influenced Tim Burton. This one makes less of an argument than that one did, but truly obsessive cinephiles may still find themselves able to construct one. An obvious starting point: we consider few filmmakers as French as Godard, and which country’s flag has these very colors? Well, besides those of America, Australia, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, Iceland, North Korea, Luxembourg, Schleswig-Holstein, Thailand, and so on. And in interviews, Godard has distanced himself from pure Frenchness, preferring the designation "Franco-Swiss." But still, you can start thinking there. Or you can just enjoy the images. Related Content: How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay Wes Anderson Likes the Color Red (and Yellow) Jean-Luc Godard Gives a Dramatic Reading of Hannah Arendt’s "On the Nature of Totalitarianism" A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963) Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Commercial for Schick (1971) Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opération béton(1955) — a Construction Documentary Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge": a Striking Supercut of the Vivid Colors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films 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 this short stop-motion film, Alexandra Lemay draws some creative inspiration from Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick and leaves us with a "cautionary tale of what happens when we don’t think enough about what we buy." Produced as part of the National Film Board of Canada’s Hothouse apprenticeship program, All the Rage follows a mink’s experience shopping in a luxury fur store. It’s perhaps not too much of a spoiler to say, it doesn’t end well. Lemay tells you more about the making of the film here. And don’t miss the many great films in the Animation section of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. 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. Fantastic Mr. Fox Meets The Shining in an Animated, Cautionary Tale About Consumerism 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 is it that makes us human? And how best to ensure that we all get our fair say? For director, photographer, and environmental activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the answers lay in framing all of his interview subjects using the same single image layout. The formal simplicity and unwavering gaze of his new documentary, Human, encourage viewers to perceive his 2,020 subjects as equals in the storytelling realm. There’s a deep diversity of experiences on display here, arranged for maximum resonance. The quietly content first wife of a polygamist marriage is followed by a polyamorous fellow, whose unconventional lifestyle is a source of both torment and joy. There’s a death row inmate. A lady so confident she appears with her hair in curlers. Where on earth did he find them? His subjects hail from 60 countries. Arthus-Bertrand obviously went out of his way to be inclusive, resulting in a wide spectrum of gender and sexual orientations, and subjects with disabilities, one a Hiroshima survivor. Tears, laughter, conflicting emotions… students of theater and psychiatry would do well to bookmark this page. There’s a lot one can glean from observing these subjects’ unguarded faces. The project was inspired by an impromptu chat with a Malian farmer. The director was impressed by the frankness with which this stranger spoke of his life and dreams: I dreamed of a film in which the power of words would resonate with the beauty of the world. Putting the ills of humanity at the heart of my work—poverty, war, immigration, homophobia—I made certain choices. Committed, political choices. But the men talked to me about everything: their difficulty in growing as well as their love and happiness. This richness of the human word lies at the heart of Human.  In Volume I, above, the interviewees consider love, women, work, and poverty. Volume II deals with war, forgiveness, homosexuality, family, and the afterlife. Happiness, education, disability, immigration, corruption, and the meaning of life are the concerns of the third volume . The interview segments are broken up by aerial sequences, reminiscent of the images in Arthus-Bertrand’s book, The Earth from Above. It’s a good reminder of how small we all are in the grand scheme of things. Appropriately, given the subject matter, and the director’s longtime interest in environmental issues, the filming and promotion were accomplished in the most sustainable way, with the support of the GoodPlanet Foundation and the United Carbon Action program. It would be lovely for all humanity if this is a feature of filmmaking going forward. The Google Cultural Institute has a collection of related material, from the making of the soundtrack to behind-the-scenes reminiscences of the interview team. Human will be added to our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her new play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Human: The Movie Features Interviews with 2,020 People from 60 Countries on What It Means to Be Human 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 fate of the visionary is to be forever outside of his or her time. Such was the life of Nikola Tesla, who dreamed the future while his opportunistic rival Thomas Edison seized the moment. Even now the name Tesla conjures seemingly wildly impractical ventures, too advanced, too expensive, or far too elegant in design for mass production and consumption. No one better than David Bowie, the pop artist of possibility, could embody Tesla’s air of magisterial high seriousness on the screen. And few were better suited than Tesla himself, perhaps, to extrapolate from his time to ours and see the technological future clearly. Of course, this image of Tesla as a lone, heroic, and even somewhat tragic figure who fell victim to Edison’s designs is a bit of a romantic exaggeration. As even the editor of a 1935 feature interview piece in the now-defunct Liberty magazine wrote, Tesla and Edison may have been rivals in the "battle between alternating and direct current…. Otherwise the two men were merely opposites. Edison had a genius for practical inventions immediately applicable. Tesla, whose inventions were far ahead of the time, aroused antagonisms which delayed the fruition of his ideas for years." One can in some respects see why Tesla "aroused antagonisms." He may have been a genius, but he was not a people person, and some of his views, though maybe characteristic of the times, are downright unsettling. In the lengthy Liberty essay, "as told to George Sylvester Viereck" (a poet and Nazi sympathizer who also interviewed Hitler), Tesla himself makes the pronouncement, "It seems that I have always been ahead of my time." He then goes on to enumerate some of the ways he has been proven right, and confidently lists the characteristics of the future as he sees it. No one likes a know-it-all, but Tesla refused to compromise or ingratiate himself, though he suffered for it professionally. And he was, in many cases, right. Many of his 1935 predictions in Liberty are still too far off to measure, and some of them will seem outlandish, or criminal, to us today. But some still seem plausible, and a few advisable if we are to make it another 100 years as a species. Tesla’s predictions include the following, which he introduces with the disclaimer that "forecasting is perilous. No man can look very far into the future." "Buddhism and Christianity… will be the religion of the human race in the twenty-first century." "The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established." Tesla went on to comment, "no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal." "Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2025 than the Secretary of War." Along with personal hygiene, Tesla included "pollution" as a social ill in need of regulation. "I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life." "There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India." (Tesla did not foresee the anti-gluten mania of the 21st century.) "Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power." Along with this optimistic prediction, Tesla foresaw that "the struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines." Tesla goes on to predict the elimination of war, "by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself," after which war chests would be diverted to funding education and research. He then describes—in rather fantastical-sounding terms—an apparatus that "projects particles" and transmits energy, enabling not only a revolution in defense technology, but "undreamed of results in television." Tesla diagnoses his time as one in which "we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age." The solution, he asserts—along with most futurists, then and now—"does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine." As an example of such mastery, Tesla describes the future of "automatons" taking over human labor and the creation of "a thinking machine." Matt Novak at the Smithsonian has analyzed many of Tesla’s claims, interpreting his predictions about "hygiene and physical culture" as a foreshadowing of the EPA and discussing Tesla’s work in robotics ("Today," Tesla proclaimed, "the robot is an accepted fact"). The Liberty article was not the first time Tesla had made large-scale, public predictions about the century to come and beyond. In 1926, Tesla gave an interview to Collier’s magazine in which he more or less accurately foresaw smartphones and wireless telephony and computing: When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.  Telsa also made some odd predictions about fuel-less passenger flying machines "free from any limitations of the present airplanes and dirigibles" and spouted more of the scary stuff about eugenics that had come to obsess him late in life. Additionally, Tesla saw changing gender relations as the precursor of a coming matriarchy. This was not a development he characterized in positive terms. For Tesla, feminism would "end in a new sex order, with the female as superior." (As Novak notes, Tesla’s misgivings about feminism have made him a hero to the so-called "men’s rights" movement.) While he fully granted that women could and would match and surpass men in every field, he warned that "the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee." It seems to me that a "bee civilization" would appeal to a eugenicist, except, I suppose, Tesla feared becoming a drone. Although he saw the development as inevitable, he still sounds to me like any number of current politicians who argue that society should continue to suppress and discriminate against women for their own good and the good of "civilization." Tesla may be an outsider hero for geek culture everywhere, but his social attitudes give me the creeps. While I’ve personally always liked the vision of a world in which robots do most the work and we spend most of our money on education, when it comes to the elimination of war, I’m less sanguine about particle rays and more sympathetic to the words of Ivor Cutler. via Smithsonian/Paleofuture Related Content: Electric Photo of Nikola Tesla, 1899 Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It Mark Twain Plays With Electricity in Nikola Tesla’s Lab (Photo, 1894) Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal Publishes 28 Predictions for the Year 2000 Philip K. Dick Makes Off-the-Wall Predictions for the Future: Mars Colonies, Alien Viruses & More (1981) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee, The Rule of Eugenics (1926/35) is a post from: Open Culture. 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These days, if you like a piece of music, you might well say that you’re "feeling it" — or you might have said it a decade or two ago, anyway. But deaf music-lovers (who, as one may not immediately assume, exist) do literally that, feeling the actual vibrations of the sound with not their ears, but the rest of their bodies. Not only could the deaf and blind Helen Keller, a pioneer in so many ways, enjoy music, she could do it over the radio and articulate the experience vividly. We know that thanks to a 1924 piece of correspondence posted at Letters of Note. "On the evening of February 1st, 1924, the New York Symphony Orchestra played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York," writes the site’s author Shaun Usher. "Thankfully for those who couldn’t attend, the performance was broadcast live on the radio. A couple of days later, the orchestra received a stunning letter of thanks from the unlikeliest of sources: Helen Keller." The first ecstatic paragraph of her missive, which you can read whole at the original post, runs as follows: I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s "Ninth Symphony." I do not mean to say that I "heard" the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibrations, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roll of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voice leaped up trilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth—an ocean of heavenly vibration—and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes. Keller ends the letter by emphasizing her desire to "thank Station WEAF for the joy they are broadcasting in the world," and since she first enjoyed the symphony on the radio, it makes sense, in a way, that we should enjoy her letter on the radio. Not long after Letters of Note made its post, NPR picked up on the story, and Weekend Edition‘s Scott Simon read an excerpt over a musical backdrop, which you can hear above. And if we have any deaf readers who listen to, say, NPR in Keller’s manner, let me say how curious I’d be to hear the details of that experience as well. And deaf, hearing, or otherwise, you’ll find much more of this sort of thing in Letters of Note’s immaculately designed new print collection More Letters of Note, about which you can find all the details here. It goes on sale on October 1. Related Content: Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties Helen Keller Speaks About Her Greatest Regret — Never Mastering Speech Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan Appear Together in Moving 1930 Newsreel Leonard Bernstein Conducts Beethoven’s 9th in a Classic 1979 Performance Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. "A Glorious Hour": Helen Keller Describes The Ecstasy of Feeling Beethoven’s Ninth Played on the Radio (1924) 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.

Popular music has a rich tradition of literary songwriters, including—to name but a few—Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, and even Alan Parsons, who released not one, but two concept albums based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. And then there’s the inimitable Tom Waits, who doesn’t just work in a literary vein, but is a succession of pulpy characters, each one with the ability to light up a stage. Waits proved as much in 1988 when he toured his album Big Time, as alter-ego Frank O’Brien, a character he described as "a combination of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, playing accordion—but without the wisdom they possessed." The Big Time tour, writes Dangerous Minds, was "like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Wait’s brain." In a review of the concert film of the same name, also released that year, the New York Times described Waits as a "gang of overlapping personas, a bunch of derelict philosopher-kings who rasp out romantic metaphors between wisecracks," inhabiting "a seedy urban world of pawnshops and tattoos, of cigarette butts and polyester and triple-X movies." It’s hard to know, listening to Waits in the interview above from the year of Big Time the album, tour, and film, how many of his personae emerge from the woodshed and how many spring from grizzled voices in that sideshow brain, which must sound like a cacophony of old-time waltzes and scurrilous ragtimes; boozy big-band numbers carousing in louche cabarets; pianos drunkenly falling down stairs. Waits can tell stories beautiful and terrible, in talking blues, broken ballads, and sprechgesang, rivaling the best compositions of the Delta, the beats, and sailors and hoboes. Or he can tell stories—as he does above—about moles, building under Stonehenge "the most elaborate system of mole catacombs," being rewarded for "having the courage to tunnel under great rivers," staging executions. Then he shifts the scene to New York, and a Mercedes pulls up in a puddle of blood. "I think you just write," says Waits, "and you don’t try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it." Waits gets it in vivid, surrealist images, one bizarre and sordid detail after another. To hear him speak is to hear him compose. You can read the transcript of the short interview, recorded in London by Chris Roberts, but the effect of Waits-the-performer is entirely lost. Better to hear his cracked inflection, his driest of comic timing, and watch the excellent animation of PBS’s Blank on Blank team, who have previously brought us amusing cartoon accompaniments for interviews with B.B. King, Ray Charles, the Beastie Boys, and even Fidel Castro. Tom Waits, I think, has given them their best material yet. Related Content:   Tom Waits, Playing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Classic 1978 TV Performance Tom Waits Reads Two Charles Bukowski Poems, "The Laughing Heart" and "Nirvana" Watch Tom Waits’ Classic Appearance on Australian TV, 1979 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Animated Tom Waits Talks About Laughing at Funerals & the Moles Under Stonehenge (1988) 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.

Grab a cup of coffee, put on your thinking cap, and start working through this newly-released video from Minute Physics, which explains why guitars, violins and other instruments can be tuned to a tee. But when it comes to pianos, it’s an entirely differently story, a mathematical impossibility. Pianos are slightly but necessarily out of tune. 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. You can find some Free Online Math Courses here. Why You Can Never Tune a Piano 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.

Image by Alan Light released under Creative Commons license. When he passed away in 2012, science fiction master Ray Bradbury left us with a number of instantly quotable lines. There are aphorisms like "You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." There are more humorous, but no less memorable lines he delivers in his advice to writers, such as, "writing is not a serious business… I want you to envy me my joy." A seemingly endless source of wisdom and enthusiasm, Bradbury’s creative forces seemed in no danger of waning in his later years as he gave impassioned talks and interviews well into his 70s and 80 and his work received renewed appreciation. As one writer declared in 2001, "Ray Bradbury is on fire!" Of course Bradbury’s been hot since the fifties. That headline alludes to his classic 1953 novel of futuristic book-burning, Fahrenheit 451, which you’ve likely read if you’ve read any Bradbury at all. Or perhaps you’re familiar with Bradbury’s non-sci-fi novel of childhood lost, Dandelion Wine? Both are excellent books well-deserving of the awards and praise heaped upon them. But if they’re all you know of Ray Bradbury, you’re seriously missing out. Bradbury began his career as a writer of short sci-fi and horror stories that excel in their richness of language and careful plotting. So imaginative is his work that it warranted adaptation into a star-studded television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater. And before that vehicle brought Bradbury’s brilliance into people’s homes, many of those same stories appeared in radio plays produced by shows like NBC’s Dimension X and X Minus One. From the latter program, at the top, we bring you Mars is Heaven!, a disturbing 1948 tale of interstellar deception. "When the first space rocket lands on Mars," begins the announcer, "what will we find? Only the ruins of a dead, deserted planet, or will there be life?" Pertinent questions indeed. Bradbury speculated for decades about the meaning of Mars. "The Martian Chronicles," adapted above by Dimension X, used a story about colonization of the planet as an allegory for humanity’s avarice and folly. Hear many more Dimension X radio plays from The Martian Chronicles collection here, and also the story, "There Will Come Soft Rains." The year after 1950’s The Martian Chronicles came 1951’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of shorts that included the tragic, lost-in-space tale "Kaleidoscope," dramatized above by Mind Webs, a series from Madison, Wisconsin that ran from the 70s through the mid-90s. Though produced well after the golden age of radio drama, the series nonetheless managed to perfectly capture the engrossing sound of that specialized form—with ominous music, and a baritone-voiced narrator with some serious voice-acting chops. While regional productions like Mind Webs have kept the radio drama fires burning in the U.S., the BBC has continued to produce high-quality radio adaptations on a larger scale. In 1991, they took on eight stories from another fifties Bradbury collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun. The two hour production dramatized the title story and the tales "Hail and Farewell," "The Flying Machine," "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," "A Sound of Thunder," "The Murderer," "The April Witch," and "The Foghorn." You can hear them just above. Or stream and download the complete audio at the Internet Archive. Related Content: 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free X Minus One: More Classic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury & Dick Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) Hear Radio Dramas of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy & 7 Classic Asimov Stories Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Ray Bradbury’s Beloved Sci-Fi Stories as Classic Radio Dramas 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.

Earlier this month, we featured Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play Salome as illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in 1894. Though Beardsley’s short life and career would end a scant four years later at the age of 25, the illustrator still had more than enough time to develop a clear and bold, yet elaborate and even decadent style, still immediately recognizable and deeply influential today. He also managed to visualize an impressively wide range of material, one that includes — in the very same year — the transgressively witty writing of Oscar Wilde as well as the groundbreakingly macabre writings of Edgar Allan Poe. "Aubrey Beardsley’s four Poe illustrations were commissioned by Herbert S. Stone and Company, Chicago, in 1894 as embellishment for a multi-volume collection of the author’s works," writes artist and designer John Coulthart. "The Black Cat (above) is justifiably the most reproduced of these." The Literary Archive blog argues that "what Beardsley’s illustrations do tell us of is that Poe’s stories are not static, but living works that each new generation gets to experience in [its] own way," and that they "give us a glimpse into a slight decadence and gothic-ness still preferred in horror at the time (a giant orangutan envelopes the girl in his arms—King Kong anyone?)" They also remind us that "our taste for creepiness, for hearing tales about the darker side of human life, hasn’t changed appreciably in over 150 years." If the American author and the English illustrator would seem to make for odd literary and artistic bedfellows, well, therein lies the appeal: when one strong creative sensibility comes up against another, things can well go off in the kind of richly bizarre directions you see hinted at in the images here. If you’d like to own a piece of this odd chapter in the history of illustrated texts, keep your eye on Sotheby’s — you’ll only have to come up with between 4,000 and 6,000 pounds. via The Paris Review Related Content: Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in a Striking Modern Aesthetic (1894) Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" (1884) 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (1894) 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.

According to Ruth Graham in Slate, Banned Books Week is a "crock," an unnecessary public   indulgence since "there is basically no such thing as a ‘banned book’ in the United States in 2015." And though the awareness-raising week’s sponsor, the American Library Association, has shifted its focus to book censorship in classrooms, most of the challenges posed to books in schools are silly and easily dismissed. Yet, some other cases, like that of Persepolis—Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir of her Iranian childhood during the revolution—are not. The book was pulled from Chicago Public School classrooms (but not from libraries) in 2013. Even now, teachers who wish to use the book in classes must complete "supplemental training." The ostensibly objectionable content in the book is no more graphic than that in most history textbooks, and it’s easy to make the case that Persepolis and other challenged memoirs and novels that offer perspectives from other countries, cultures, or political points of view have inherent educational value. One might be tempted to think that school officials pulled the book for other reasons. Perhaps we need Banned Books Week after all. Another, perhaps fuzzier, case of a "banned" book—or poem—from this year involves a high school teacher’s firing over his classroom reading of Allen Ginsberg’s pornographic poem "Please Master." The case of "Please Master" should put us in mind of a once banned book written by Ginsberg: epic Beat jeremiad "Howl." When the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, attempted to import British copies of the poem in 1957, the books were seized by customs, then he and his business partner were arrested and put on trial for obscenity. After writers and academics testified to the poem’s cultural value, the judge vindicated Ferlinghetti, and "Howl." But the trial demonstrated at the time that the government reserved the right to seize books, stop their publication and sale, and keep material from the reading public if it so chose. As with this year’s dust-up over "Please Master," the agents who confiscated "Howl" supposedly objected to the sexual content of Ginsberg’s poem (and likely the homosexual content especially). But that reasoning could also have been cover for other objections to the poem’s political content. "Howl," after all, was very subversive in its day, and in a way served as a kind of manifesto against the status quo. It had a "cataclysmic impact," writes Fred Kaplan, "not just on the literary world but on the broader society and culture." We’ve featured various readings of "Howl" in the past, and if you’ve somehow missed hearing those, never heard the poem read at all, or never read the poem yourself, then consider during this Banned Books Week taking the time to read it and hear it read—by the poet himself. You can hear the first recorded reading by Ginsberg, in 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. You can hear another impassioned Ginsberg reading from 1959. And above, hear Ginsberg read the poem in 1956, in San Francisco, where it was first published and where it stood trial. You can also hear Ginsberg fan James Franco—who played the poet in a film called Howl—read the poem over a visually striking animation of its vivid imagery. And if Ginsberg isn’t your thing, consider checking out the ALA’s list of challenged or banned books for 2014-2015. (I could certainly recommend Persepolis.) While prohibiting books from the classroom may seem a far cry from government censorship, Banned Books Week reminds us that many people still find certain kinds of books deeply threatening, and should push us to ask why that is. Related Content: High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explicit Poem "Please Master" and Loses His Job The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading "Howl" (1956) Allen Ginsberg Reads His Famously Censored Beat Poem, Howl (1959) James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’ Find great poems in our collection, 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness It’s Banned Books Week: Listen to Allen Ginsberg Read His Famously Banned Poem, "Howl," in San Francisco, 1956 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.

On May 27, 1956, millions of Americans tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show, expecting the usual variety of comedians, talents and musical guests. What they weren’t prepared for was a short animated film that Sullivan introduced thusly: Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers — I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated — but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called "A Short Vision" in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner. And with that, he screened the horrific bit of animation you can watch above. At the height of the atomic age, this film was a short sharp shock. Its vision of a nuclear holocaust is told in the style of a fable or storybook, with both animals and humans witnessing their last moments on earth, and ending with the extinguishing of a tiny flame. The mostly static art work is all the more effective when faces melt into skulls. Many children didn’t leave the room of course, and the website Conelrad has a wonderful in-depth history of that night and collected memories from people who were traumatized by the short as a child. One child’s hair-or rather a small section of his hair-turned white from fright. It was as formative a moment as The Day After would be to children of the ‘80s. The papers the next day reported on the short in salacious detail ("Shock Wave From A-Bomb Film Rocks Nation’s TV Audience") and Sullivan not only defended his decision, but showed the film again on June 10. The film was created by married couple Peter and Joan Foldes, and shot for little money in their kitchen on a makeshift animation table. Peter was a Hungarian immigrant who had studied at the Slade School of Art and the Courtlaud Institute and apprenticed with John Halas where he learned animation. (Halas is best known for the animated feature version of Orwell’s Animal Farm.) A Short Vision would go on in September of that year to win best experimental film at the 17th Venice Film Festival. (Peter Foldes would later make another disturbing and award-winning short called Hunger.) Once so shocking, A Short Vision fell out of circulation. But a generation grew up remembering that they had seen something horrific on television that night (in black and white, not the color version above.) For a time, it was hard to find a mention of the film on IMDB and a damaged educational print was one of the few copies circulating around. Fortunately the British Film Institute has made a pristine copy available of this important Cold War document. What we want to know is this: Did Steven Spielberg see this movie that Sunday night in 1956? He would have been 10 years old. A Short Vision will be added to the Animation section of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via A Wasted Life Related content: Dick Van Dyke, Paul Lynde & the Original Cast of Bye Bye Birdie Appear on The Ed Sullivan Show (1961) Animated Films Made During the Cold War Explain Why America is Exceptionally Exceptional Dizzy Gillespie Worries About Nuclear & Environmental Disaster in Vintage Animated Films 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. The Night Ed Sullivan Scared a Nation with the Apocalyptic Animated Short, A Short Vision (1956) 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 were to ask me in my callow years as a young art student to name my favorite painter, I would have answered without a moment’s hesitation: Wassily Kandinsky. His theoretical bent, his mysticism, his seemingly near total creative independence…. There were times when Kandinsky the thinker, writer, and teacher appealed to me even more than Kandinsky the painter. This may go a ways toward explaining why I left art school after my first year to pursue writing and teaching. But nowadays, having seen a tiny bit more of the world and its bountiful artistic treasures, I might pause for just a moment if asked about my favorite painter… then I’d answer: Wassily Kandinsky. If you want to see the pioneering abstract expressionist’s art in the United States, your best bet is to get yourself to New York’s famed Guggenheim, which has a veritable treasure chest of Kandinsky’s work that documents his transition from paintings and woodcuts inspired by Russian folk art and French fauvism to completely non-representational canvases made entirely of intersecting lines, shapes, and colors—his own private symbology. But if you can’t make it to New York, then just head on over to the Guggenheim’s online collection, where the museum has digitized "nearly 1600 artworks by more than 575 artists." This is the most sweeping move toward greater accessibility since the private collection went public in 1937. You’ll find early representational Kandinskys; transitional Kandinskys like Sketch for Composition II from 1909-10 (top)—with still recognizable favorite motifs of his, like the horse and rider embedded in them; and you’ll find much more abstract Kandinskys like 1913’s Light Picture, above, showing his move even farther away from Matisse and Russian folks and closer to an inimitable individual aesthetic like that of Joan Miró or Paul Klee. Speaking of Klee, another of my favorites, you’ll also find the sketch above, from 1895, before he began his formal training in Munich. It’s a far cry from his mature style—a primitive minimalism that drew inspiration from children’s art. If you know anyone who looks at abstract art and says, "I could do that," show them the drawing above and ask if they could do this. Painters like Kandinsky and Klee, who worked and exhibited together, first learned to render in more rigorously formal styles before they broke every rule and made their own. It’s a necessary part of the discipline of art. Of the three artists I’ve mentioned thus far, it is perhaps Miró who moved farthest away from any semblance of classical training. In works like Personage (above), the Spanish surrealist achieved his "assassination of painting" and the realist bourgeois values he detested in European art. Piet Mondrian, another artist who completely radicalized painting, did so by moving in the opposite direction, towards a formalism so exacting as to be almost chilling. But like all modern artists, Mondrian learned the classical rules before he tore them up for good, as evidenced by his drawing below, Chrysanthemum, from 1908-09. Of course you won’t only find artists from the early twentieth century in the Guggenheim’s online collection. This just happens to be one of my favorite periods, and the Guggenheim is most famous for its modernist collection. But you’ll also find work from more contemporary provocateurs like Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei, as well as from early nineteenth century proto-impressionists like Camille Pissarro. (See Pissarro’s 1867 The Hermitage at Pontoise below.)  And if you find yourself wanting more context, the Guggenheim has made it easy to give yourself a thorough education in modern art. As we’ve noted before, between 2012 and 2014, the museum placed over 100 art catalogues online, including a collection called "The Syllabus," featuring books by the museum’s first curator. Looking for a way of understanding that weird phenomenon known as modern art? Look no further, the Guggenheim’s got you covered. Related Content: The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! Download 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online Download 448 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Guggenheim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Modern Art from 575 Artists 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.

How does "non-musician" musician, former Roxy Music member, Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay producer, and visual artist Brian Eno define art itself? "Everything that you don’t have to do." He has expanded eloquently on that simple but highly clarifying notion in speech and writing many times over the past couple of decades, and this past Sunday he made it the intellectual centerpiece of the fifth annual John Peel Lecture, a series named for the influential BBC DJ and whose past speakers have included Pete Townshend, Billy Bragg, Charlotte Church, and Iggy Pop. You can hear Eno’s introduction to his talk at the top of the post, stream the talk itself within the next 25 days at the BBC’s site, and read a transcript here. All of the John Peel Lecturers so far have discussed the relationship between music and wider human culture, and Eno has plenty of stories to tell about his own career in both music and the wider cultural realm: the importance of his time in art school, how he fell into performing with Roxy Music, how a relaxation of the band’s "strict non-drug" policy resulted in one "hilariously chaotic" performance, and how John Peel himself premiered his first album with Robert Fripp on the radio — by accidentally playing it backward. All this will inspire even the most Eno-familiar fan to revisit the man’s catalog of recorded works, which you can easily do with the Spotify playlist "Touched by the Hand of Eno," featuring "150 tracks handpicked from 150 albums/EPs/singles that credit Eno as composer, instrumentalist, vocalist, mixing engineer, or producer, sorted in chronological order." (If you need to download Spotify’s free software, you’ll find it here.) The playlist includes cuts from Eno’s own albums, of course, but also those of Roxy Music, Genesis, Ultravox, David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, Depeche Mode, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, and many more. And after you’ve virtually flipped through these selections from Eno’s body of work, you can watch Eno flip through physical selections from Peel’s library of records just above. Sure, you don’t have to do any of this — if anyone can explain to you why you should, Eno can. Related Content: Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s "Oblique Strategies" Revisit the Radio Sessions and Record Collection of Groundbreaking BBC DJ John Peel Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World Listen to "Brian Eno Day," a 12-Hour Radio Show Spent With Eno & His Music (Recorded in 1988) When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal Prof. Iggy Pop Delivers the BBC’s 2014 John Peel Lecture on "Free Music in a Capitalist Society" Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. Hear 150 Tracks Highlighting Brian Eno’s Career as a Musician, Composer & Producer & Stream His 2015 John Peel Lecture 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 1969, the BBC’s James Mossman conducted an extensive interview with Vladimir Nabokov, which was first published in a magazine called The Listener, and later in a book entitled Strong Opinions. Some of Mossman’s questions were serious: "You’ve said that you’ve explored time’s prison and have found no way out. Are you still exploring…? Some were lighter: "Why do you live in hotels?" (Answer here.) And still other questions fell somewhere in between, like: "If you ruled any modern industrial state absolutely, what would you abolish?" It turns out that loud noises, muzak, bidets, and insecticides made the great novelist and lepidopterist’s list. Which raises the question, if allowed to play benevolent dictator for a day, what would you obliterate? Me? I’d probably start with almost anything likely to appear in today’s Billboard Top 5 — dreck that’s not too far from muzak. via Biblioklept Related Content: Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis As Benevolent Dictator, Vladimir Nabokov Would Abolish Muzak & Bidets: What Would Make Your List? 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.

Educator, industrial design fabricator and Myth Busters cohost Adam Savage is driven by curiosity. Science gets his wheels turning faster than the notched disc Hippolyte Fizeau used to measure the speed of light in 1849. In his TED-Ed talk on how simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries, above, Savage zips across the centuries to share the work of three game changers - Fizeau, Eratosthenes, and Richard Feynman (one of the de facto patron saints of science-related TED talks). I found it difficult to wrap my head around the sheer quantities of information Savage shoehorns into the seven minute video, giving similarly voluble and omnivorous mathmusician Vi Hart a run for her money. Clearly, he understands exactly what he’s talking about, whereas I had to take the review quiz in an attempt to retain just a bit of this new-to-me material. I’m glad he glossed over Feynman’s childhood fascination with inertia in order to spend more time on the lesser known of his three subjects. Little Feynman’s observation of his toy wagon is charming, but the Nobel Prize winner’s life became an open book to me with Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick’s excellent graphic biography. What’s left to discover? How about Eratosthenes? I’d never before heard of the Alexandrian librarian who calculated the Earth’s circumference with astonishing accuracy around 200 BC. (It helped that he was good at math and geography, the latter of which he invented.) Inspiration fuels the arts, much as it does science, and I’d like to learn more about him. Ditto Fizeau, whom Savage describes as a less sexy scientific swashbuckler than methodical fact checker, which is what he was doing when he wound up cracking the speed of light in 1849. Two centuries earlier Galileo used lanterns to determine that light travels at least ten times faster than sound. Fizeau put Galileo’s number to the test, experimenting with his notched wheel, a candle, and mirrors and ultimately setting the speed of light at a much more accurate 313,300 Km/s. Today’s measurement of 299792.458 km/s was arrived at using technology unthinkable even a few decades ago. Personally, I would never think to measure the speed of light with something that sounds like a zoetrope, but I might write a play about someone who did. Related Content: Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers the Greatest Science Sermon Ever The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online Sam Harris: Science Can Answer Moral Questions Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday Adam Savage’s Animated Lesson on the Simple Ideas That Lead to Great Scientific Discoveries 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.

Appreciators of the finest works in cinema history often liken their images to paintings. In the case of Akira Kurosawa, maker of quite a few entries on that grand list of the finest works in cinema history, that makes professional sense: he began as a painter, only later turning filmmaker. "When I changed careers," he writes, "I burnt all the pictures that I had painted up until then. I intended to forget painting once and for all. As a well-known Japanese proverb says, ‘If you chase two rabbits, you may not catch even one.’ I did no art work at all once I began to work in cinema. But since becoming a film director, I have found that drawing rough sketches was often a useful means of explaining ideas to my staff." That comes quoted on "Akira Kurosawa: From Art to Film," a roundup of such paintings by the Emperor (a nickname Kurosawa earned through his on-set manner), set beside the resulting frames from his movies. "As a painter and filmmaker, Kurosawa stuck to his own style," writes Popmatters‘ Ian Chant in an examination of this facet of his career, "informed heavily by traditional Japanese painting as well as European impressionists and expressionists, another arena of art where he answered to both eastern and western influences. These painstakingly crafted paintings formed the visual backbone of some of Kurosawa’s most lasting achievements." The most vivid examples of canvas-turned-celluloid come from Kurosawa’s later works, such as 1980’s Kagemusha, 1985’s Ran, 1990’s Dreams, and 1993’s Madadayo, selections from each of which you see in this post. "I cannot help but be fascinated by the fact that when I tried to paint well, I could only produce mediocre pictures," continues the Emperor himself. "But when I concentrated on delineating the ideas for my films, I unconsciously produced works that people find interesting." Holding the painted work up against his film work, only the strictest cinema purist could deny that, ultimately, Kurosawa caught both rabbits. Juxtapose more painted storyboards and frames from films here. Related Content: The Paintings of Akira Kurosawa Akira Kurosawa’s 80-Minute Master Class on Making "Beautiful Movies" (2000) Akira Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies Akira Kurosawa & Gabriel García Márquez Talk About Filmmaking (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Interview Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. Akira Kurosawa Painted the Storyboards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Compare Canvas to Celluloid 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.

Who owns Star Wars, George Lucas or the fans? The short answer now, of course, is… Disney… and maybe J.J. Abrams. Given the explosion of franchising and merchandising begun by the coming tidal wave of new Star Wars films under Disney’s aegis, it will someday be difficult to convince youngsters that things were ever otherwise. But in my day [insert old man wagging finger here] the critical debate was between Lucas and the fans. I’m pretty sure the fans won. The world-building of Star Wars will outlast its creator and its first couple generations of devoted viewers, and the grand tradition of Star Wars fan films—begun almost immediately after the first Star Wars’ release with the fond parody "Hardware Wars"—will live on. Star Wars fan films even have their own annual awards program. There are many micro-genres of Star Wars fan film: Anime, Silent, Crowd-sourced, Action Figure, etc. Today we bring you perhaps the best example in the Documentary category, a "Complete Filmumentary" by filmmaker Jamie Benning. Although presented here in order of the first three Star Wars movies, this stellar example of fan craft and devotion actually began in 2006 with the film right above, Building Empire, which offers over two hours of "video clips, audio from cast and crew, alternate angles, reconstructed scenes, text facts and insights into the development and creation of The Empire Strikes Back. Next, in 2007, came Returning to Jedi, another exhaustive presentation of outtakes, behind-the-scenes moments, audio commentary, technical details, and trivia from the first trilogy’s final film. Finally, in 2011, Benning completed his fan documentary trilogy with Star Wars Begins at the top. "If you’ve never seen the deleted scenes of Jabba the Hutt or Biggs Darklighter on Tatooine, or heard David Prowse saying Vader’s dialogue," says the film’s press release, "then you will get a real kick out of this. Many reviews and comments have centered on the fact that it’s like watching your favourite movie but from an entirely different perspective." It’s also at times like watching what Star Wars might look like in an alternate universe. Some deleted scenes and early demo footage show us plot points and characters we never knew existed. In Star Wars Begins, for example, we see an early black and white silent edit, known as the "Lost Cut," and featuring a droid named "Treadwell" who resembles Short Circuit’s Johnny 5. As fan films demonstrate, again and again into seeming eternity, the Star Wars universe is infinitely malleable—despite constant bickering over canon—and offers endless riches for imaginative plunder. And for that we’ll always have the films’ original creators to thank. Benning’s painstakingly-edited documentaries show us the incredible amount of work that went into building the world of Star Wars, a world that shows no signs of ever coming to an end. Jenning’s filmumentaries will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via Mental Floss Related Content: The Making of The Empire Strikes Back Showcased on Long-Lost Dutch TV Documentary Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Universal Myth Hardware Wars: The Mother of All Star Wars Fan Films (and the Most Profitable Short Film Ever Made) Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film Freiheit, George Lucas’ Short Student Film About a Fatal Run from Communism (1966) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Complete Star Wars "Filmumentary": A 6-Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Documentary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Commentary 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.

Joseph Herscher, a kinetic artist from New Zealand, has a knack for making some pretty imaginative Rube Goldberg machines. Back in 2012, we showed you The Page Turner, a device that gives creative assistance to anyone still reading newspapers in a print format. Next week, we’ll hopefully get a chance to feature his most recent contraption. (Stay tuned for more on that.) But for now, as we head into the weekend, let’s admire The Falling Water, Herscher’s cocktail-making machine that plays on the name of a famous Frank Lloyd Wright creation. You can watch it go above. And for those who want to play along at home, here is the recipe for the drink: - 30mls (1Oz) 42BELOW Feijoa Vodka - Ch’i or Lemonade - Long slice of seedless cucumber - Ice Cut a long thin piece of cucumber on a diagonal. Rest it against the inside of a Highball glass. Fill the glass with ice, add 42BELOW Feijoa. Top with Ch’i or Lemonade. Enjoy! Related Content: An Animated Tour of Fallingwater, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Creations The Page Turner: A Fabulous Rube Goldberg Machine for Readers F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates "to Cocktail," the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928) The Falling Water: A Rube Goldberg Machine That Makes a Fine Cocktail 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.

From Andreas Hykade, the Director of the Animation and Visual Effects program at Germany’s Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, comes a short animated film called Nuggets. Things start off innocuously, with a kiwi taking a casual stroll down a road, eventually encountering and tasting some golden nuggets. The nuggets are delicious, it turns out, too delicious to resist. Then [spoiler alert!] things take a dark turn, as we watch our friendly kiwi sink into addiction and despair. In an interview conducted by the Animation World Network, Hykade says that he created the film for young teenagers who might be tempted one day (presumably by drugs). And when that day comes, he hopes they’ll think about Nuggets and its striking, stripped-down message about addiction and the life it brings. You can watch more animations by Hykade on his web site. And find more thought-provoking Animations in our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via io9 Related Content: The Coffee Pot That Fueled Honoré de Balzac’s Coffee Addiction Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955 How a Young Sigmund Freud Researched & Got Addicted to Cocaine, the New "Miracle Drug," in 1894 Free Online Psychology Courses A Short, Powerful Animation on Addiction: Watch Andreas Hykade’s Nuggets 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.

It’s getting close to that time of the year again, when the flu starts to wreak havoc. And so, with the help of NPR’s Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky, we’re taking an animated look at what actually happens when a virus invades your body and tricks a single cell into making a million more viruses, and how your immune system eventually deals with the whole mess. It’s a nice demystification of phenomena that affects our everyday lives. If you feel inclined to get a flu shot after watching this clip, I can’t say that I blame you. Follow us 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: Free Online Biology Courses What Makes Us Tick? Free Stanford Biology Course by Robert Sapolsky Offers Answers Carl Sagan Explains Evolution in an Eight-Minute Animation How a Virus Invades Your Body: An Eye-Popping, Animated Look 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 all of our minds, the word "Orwellian" conjures up a certain kind of setting: a vast, fixed bureaucracy; a dead-eyed public forced into gray, uniform living conditions; the very words we use mangled in order to better serve the interests of power. We think, on the whole, of the kind of bleakness with which George Orwell saturated the future England that provides the setting for his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Almost seventy years after that book’s publication, we now use "Orwellian" to describe the views of the political party opposite us, the Department of Motor Vehicles — anything, in short, that strikes us as brutish, monolithic, implacable, deliberately stripped of meaning, or in any way authoritarian. We use the word so much, in fact, that it can’t help but have come detached from its original meaning. "I can tell you that we live in Orwellian times," writes the Guardian‘s Sam Jordison. Or that "America is waging Orwellian wars, that TV is Orwellian, that the police are Orwellian, that Amazon is Orwellian, that publishers are Orwellian too, that Amazon withdrew copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was Orwellian (although Orwell wouldn’t like it), that Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, David Cameron, Ed Milliband, Kim Jong-un and all his relatives are Orwellian, that the TV programme Big Brother is both Orwellian and not as Orwellian as it claims to be, that Obama engages in Obamathink, that climate-change deniers and climate change scientists are Orwellian, that neoclassical economics employs Orwellian language. That, in fact, everything is Orwellian," Jordison continues. Here to restore sense to our usage of the most common word derived from the name of a writer, we have the Ted-Ed video at the top of the post. In it, and in the associated lesson on Ted-Ed’s site, Noah Tavlin breaks down the term’s meaning, its origin, the failings of our modern interpretation of it, and how truly Orwellian phenomena continue to invade our daily life without our even realizing it. "The next time you hear someone say ‘Orwellian,'" says Tavlin, "pay close attention. If they’re talking about the deceptive and manipulative use of language, they’re on the right track. If they’re talking about mass surveillance and intrusive government, they’re describing something authoritarian, but not necessarily Orwellian. And if they use it as an all-purpose word for any ideas they dislike, it’s possible that their statements are more Orwellian than whatever it is they’re criticizing" — an outcome Orwell himself might well have foreseen. Related Content: George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984 Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949) George Orwell and Douglas Adams Explain How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources George Orwell’s Five Greatest Essays (as Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Hiltzik) Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. What "Orwellian" Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term 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 Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest narratives in the world, got a surprise update last month when the Sulaymaniyah Museum in the Kurdistan region of Iraq announced that it had discovered 20 new lines of the Babylonian-Era poem of gods, mortals, and monsters. Since the poem has existed in fragments since the 18th century BC, there has always been the possibility that more would turn up. And yet the version we’re familiar with — the one discovered in 1853 in Nineveh — hasn’t changed very much over recent decades. The text remained fairly fixed — that is, until the fall of Baghdad in 2003 and the intense looting that followed yielded something new. Since that time, the History Blog notes: the [Sulaymaniyah] museum has a matter of policy paid smugglers to keep artifacts from leaving the country, no questions asked. The tablet was acquired by the museum in late 2011 as part of a collection of 80-90 tablets sold by an unnamed shady character. Professor Farouk Al-Rawi examined the collection while the seller haggled with museum official Abdullah Hashim. When Al-Rawi saw this tablet, he told Hashim to pay whatever the seller wanted: $800. That’s a pretty good deal for these extra lines that not only add to the poem’s length, but have now cleared up some of the mysteries in the other chapters. These lines come from Chapter Five of the epic and cast the main characters in a new light. Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu are shown to feel guilt over killing Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest, who is now seen as less a monster and more a king. Just like a good director’s cut, these extra scenes clear up some muddy character motivation, and add an environmental moral to the tale. The History Blog article has an in depth description of the translation, with links to a scholarly paper on this very important find, and prompts the question, how much more is there to be discovered? In the video above, Hazha Jalal, manager of the tablet’s section of the Sulaymaniyah Museum talks (in Kurdish) about the new discovery, saying (in translation): "The tablet dates back to the Neo-Bablyonian period, 2000-1500 BCE. It is a part of tablet V of the epic. It was acquired by the Museum in the year 2011 and [then] Dr. Farouk Al-Raw transliterated it. It was written as a poem and many new things this version has added, for example Gilgamesh and his friend met a monkey. We are honored to house this tablet and anyone can visit the Museum during its opening hours from 8:30 morning to noon. The entry is free for you and your guests. Thank you." In the meantime, if you’ve got a few minutes to spare, you can click here to Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia. You can also find the epic in our twin collections, 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. via The History Blog Related content: Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the "Neanderthal Flute," Dating Back Over 43,000 Years Hear the "Seikilos Epitaph," the Oldest Complete Song in the World: An Inspiring Tune from 100 BC Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien 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. 20 New Lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh Discovered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Story 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 Apollo program, launched in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, flew its first manned mission in 1968, and the following summer, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin met the program’s mandate, making their historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing. In the ensuing few years, several more spacecraft and crews either orbited or landed on the Moon, and for a brief moment, popular magazines and newspapers regularly featured photographs of those expeditions on their covers and front pages. Looking every bit the authentic vintage Hasselblad photos they are, the images you see here were taken by Apollo astronauts on their various missions and sent home in rolls of hundreds of similar pictures. These astronauts snapped photos inside and outside the spacecraft, in orbit and on the moon’s surface, and in 2004 NASA began digitizing the resulting cache of film. Luckily for the public, devoted space enthusiast and archivist, Kipp Teague—an IT director at Lynchburg College in Virginia—has posted a huge number of these photos (8,400 to be exact) on his Project Apollo Archive Flickr account. Teague initially began acquiring the photos in collaboration with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, "a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972." Understandably, so many people expressed interest in the photographs that Teague reformatted them in higher resolution and gave them their own home on the web. The Planetary Society informs us, "every photo taken on the lunar surface by astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras is included in the collection." While Teague and Jones’ other sites use photos that have been processed to increase their clarity, lighting, and color, the photos on Project Apollo Archive remain in their original state. "Browsing the entire set," writes the Planetary Society, "takes on the feeling of looking through an old family photo album." Indeed, especially if you grew up in the late-sixties/early-seventies at the height of the space program’s popularity. A good many of the photos are rather procedural shots of craters and clouds, especially those from earlier missions. But quite a few frame the breathtaking vistas, technical details, and awestruck, if exhausted, faces you see here. So many photos were taken and uploaded in succession that clicking rapidly through a photostream can produce an almost flipbook effect. You can browse the archive by album, each one representing a reel from different Apollo missions—including that famous 11th (top, and below)—though Teague has yet to post high resolution images from Apollo 8 and 13. It seemed after Apollo’s demise in the mid-seventies that photographs like these documented a lost age of NASA exploration, and that the once-great government agency would cede its innovative role to private companies like Elon Musk’s Space X, who have been much less forthcoming about releasing media to the public, making proprietary claims over their space photography in particular. But thanks in part to Space X and the cooperation of Canadian, European, Russian, and Japanese space programs, NASA’s International Space Station has raised the agency’s public profile considerably in the past several years. Though still painfully underfunded, NASA’s cool again. Even more profile-raising is the Mars Rover program, whose recent finding of water has refueled speculations about life on the Red Planet. As films like the recent, astronaut-approved The Martian and a raft of others show, our collective imagination has long bent toward human exploration of Mars. Establishing a base on Mars, after all, is Space X’s stated mission. Looking at these stunning vintage photos of the Apollo Lunar missions makes me long to see what the first astronauts to walk on Mars send back. We probably won’t have to wait long once they’re up there. We’ll likely get Instagram uploads, maybe even some with fake vintage Hasselblad filters. It won’t be quite the same; few current events can compete with nostalgia. But I like to think we can look forward in the near future to a renaissance of manned—and woman-ed—space exploration. See many hundreds more Apollo Lunar Mission photos at Project Apollo Archive and follow the archive on Facebook for updates. via The Planetary Society Related Content: Landing on the Moon: July 20, 1969 Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Photos Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Go Through Customs and Sign Immigration Form After the First Moon Landing (1969) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 8,400 Stunning High-Res Photos From the Apollo Moon Missions Are Now Online 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.

Art is speech. Art is what life is about.  Bernie Sanders, Democratic Candidate for President of the United States A rousing sentiment, and one rarely expressed by those running for the nation’s highest office. Once a candidate has been safely elected, he may feel comfortable betraying a deeper affinity, or ceding to the tastes of an arts-inclined First Lady. Sanders isn’t waiting, pledging in the video above, that he will be an Arts President. The Americans for the Arts Action Fund tracks the candidates’ records with regard to arts advocacy, and it appears that Sanders has been walking the walk for quite some time. He filmed a half-hour long documentary about labor leader Eugene Debs. He recorded a 1987 folk album with the help of 30 Vermont musicians, stoutly pronouncing the lyrics to "This Land is Your Land" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" a la Rex Harrison. Vice’s Paul Best made a compelling case for how Bernie Sanders shaped the northeast punk scene. If Allen Ginsberg could vote from beyond the grave, I’m pretty sure I know which lever he’d be pulling… With regard to living celebrities, it’s no big surprise to see that Will Ferrell, Susan Sarandon, and John C Reilly are among the artists supporting Bernie Sanders. Hollywood has long embraced liberal candidates. They are joined on the ever growing list of Artists and Cultural Leaders for Bernie Sanders by musicians Jello Biafra and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, comedians Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman, and graffiti artists Ron English and Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obama Hope poster. As Sanders fans wait to see whether Fairey will perform a similar service for his 2016 pick, Stencils for Bernie is taking up the slack with downloadable images for the DIY-inclined. I presume that it’s only a matter of time before some young animator puts him or herself at Sanders’ disposal, though I kind of hope not. The candidate’s short video is reassuringly devoid of the snappy visuals that have become a staple of the form, thanks to such popular series as Crash Course, CGP Grey, The School of Life, and TED Ed. via Hyperallergic Related Content: Bernie Sanders Sings "This Land is Your Land" on the Endearingly Bad Spoken Word Album, We Shall Overcome Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, "Burlington Snow" (1986) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this month. Follow her @AyunHalliday Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts President 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.