"The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." -Aldous Huxley (1936) Lior Sperandeo, who has previously directed short films called People of Mumbai, People of Nepal, and People of Senegal, returns with a film that resists focusing on a sense of place. People of Nowhere captures the plight of Syrian refugees, fleeing their worn-torn country for a safer life in Europe. Explaining how he came to make the dramatic film, Sperandeo writes: I have heard and read different opinions about the wave of Syrian refugees who try to make their way in to the EU. Then I went to Lesvos. 7 days on the Greek Island gave me a healthier, human perspective on the situation.  Seeing the people behind the headlines with my own eyes, and feeling their deep struggle, broke my heart.  Are they the ‘threat’ people talk about? All I saw were courageous people in a time of crisis, looking for hope.  I also got to meet brave volunteers from all over the world who reach out to help all people regardless of their religion, race or background. That inspired me.  My hope is that this video might tear down some of the walls of bad ideas and opinions we have built around ourselves. You can watch Lior’s film, a reminder that real lives are stake in the slow-moving genocide in Syria, on Vimeo here. And visit his Vimeo Channel here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. People of Nowhere: Short, Powerful Film Captures the Human Dimension of the Syrian Refugee Crisis 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 empire of Prince is a tightly controlled kingdom, ruled by an enigmatic and eccentric musical genius with a legendarily contentious relationship with the music industry. For most of the nineties, he was referred to as "the artist formerly known as Prince," having changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol to spite his label Warner Bros. "During that time," writes Rolling Stone, "sales of his new music slowed down significantly, but he still managed to get his point across." You have to admire an artist—even one as wealthy and successful as Prince—willing to take a financial hit for the sake of principle. In his most recent stand (though it probably won’t cost him anything worth mentioning in streaming revenue), Prince removed all of his music this past summer from every streaming service except Jay-Z’s Tidal. So we’re very lucky to have the black-and-white taped live performance here from 1982 at New Jersey’s Capitol Theatre (released by The Music Vault), two years before he hit his 80s peak with the release of Purple Rain the film and album. Whatever you think of Purple Rain the movie (actress Apollonia Kotero was nominated for a Razzie for worst new star, and her Prince-penned song "Sex Shooter" for worst original song), no one can deny the absolute pop brilliance of the album. It’s hard to pick a favorite; most of us can sing the choruses to "Let’s Go Crazy," "When Doves Cry," or "I Would Die 4 U" in our sleep. That said, Prince had already released some of the finest music of his career by the time he appeared at this New Jersey concert, including one of my personal favorites, "Controversy" (top) from the 1981 album of the same name and "I Wanna Be Your Lover" (above) from 1979’s Prince. We don’t get anything from the year’s groundbreaking 1999, the first album to feature the Revolution, but we do get classics of the sleazy sex-god first phase of the Purple One’s career, including "Jack U Off," above, in which Prince pulls out some classic male-stripper-does-jazzersize dance moves while the band rips through the raucous stomper of a tune at almost punk tempo and volume. These three songs represent three of facets Prince as an artist: There’s the agitated social commentator, the sensitive, pining lover, and the unrepentant horndog. He’s emphasized one or another of these persona over the course of his career, modulating them with the funked-up futurist character he evolved into as the decade progressed. Prince’s attempts at film stardom mostly fall into the so-bad-they’re-good category, beginning with rock opera Purple Rain. But few know that he intended to release his first celluloid effort around the time of this concert. It was to be called The Second Coming, to accompany a scrapped album of the same name. Hear him sing the unreleased, gospel-inspired title song above, whose lyrics recall one of Michael Jackson’s socially conscious anthems and include the line "How many more good men must die before there’s gun control." To learn more about that ill-fated film project, read this interview with the proposed director Chuck Statler, the "godfather of the music video," here. And to see the full Capitol Theatre show, check it out on Youtube here, or right down below. Related Content: 35 Years of Prince’s Hairstyles in 15 Glorious Seconds! Watch a Young Bob Marley and The Wailers Perform Live in England (1973): For His 70th Birthday Today The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Complete Concert Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Prince Perform Early Hits in a 1982 Concert: "Controversy," "I Wanna Be Your Lover" & 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.

I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as "Kafka’s Castle," a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel. Even if you haven’t read The Castle, if you work for such an entity—or like all of us have regular dealings with the IRS, the healthcare and banking system, etc.—you’re well aware of the devilish incompetence that masquerades as due diligence and ties us all in knots. Why do multi-million and billion dollar agencies seem unable, or unwilling, to accomplish the simplest of tasks? Why do so many of us spend our lives in the real-life bureaucratic nightmares satirized in the The Office and Office Space? One answer comes via Laurence J. Peter’s 1969 satire The Peter Principle—which offers the theory that managers and executives get promoted to the level of their incompetence—then, David Brent-like, go on to ruin their respective departments. The Harvard Business Review summed up disturbing recent research confirming and supplementing Peter’s insights into the narcissism, overconfidence, or actual sociopathy of many a government and business leader. But in addition to human failings, there’s another possible reason for bureaucratic disorder; the conspiracy-minded among us may be forgiven for assuming that in many cases, institutional incompetence is the result of deliberate sabotage from both above and below. The ridiculous inner workings of most organizations certainly make a lot more sense when viewed in the light of one set of instructions for "purposeful stupidity," namely the once top-secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual, written in 1944 by the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Now declassified and freely available on the CIA’s website, the manual the agency describes as "surprisingly relevant" was once distributed to OSS officers abroad to assist them in training "citizen-saboteurs" in occupied countries like Norway and France. Such people, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, "might already be sabotaging materials, machinery, or operations of their own initiative," but may have lacked the devious talent for sowing chaos that only an intelligence agency can properly master. Genuine laziness, arrogance, and mindlessness may surely be endemic. But the Field Manual asserts that "purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature" and requires a particular set of skills. The citizen-saboteur "frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage." You can read and download the full document here. To get a sense of just how "timeless"—according to the CIA itself—such instructions remain, see the abridged list below, courtesy of Business Insider. You will laugh ruefully, then maybe shudder a little as you recognize how much your own workplace, and many others, resemble the kind of dysfunctional mess the OSS meticulously planned during World War II. Organizations and Conferences Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Managers In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do. Employees Work slowly. Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can. Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker. via Slate/Business Insider Related Content: The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook The C.I.A.’s "Bestiary of Intelligence Writing" Satirizes Spook Jargon with Maurice Sendak-Style Drawings How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless, Kafkaesque Guide to Subverting Any Organization with "Purposeful Stupidity" (1944) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I once read a book by Larry King called How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere. Slavoj Zizek might well consider writing a book of his own called How to Make Intellectual Pronouncements About Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. From Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" to political correctness to the Criterion Collection to Starbucks (and those just among the topics we’ve featured here on Open Culture) the Slovenian philosopher-provocateur has for decades demonstrated a willingness to expound on the widest possible variety of subjects, to the point where his career has begun to look like one continuous, free-associative analytical monologue, which in the Big Think video above reaches the inevitable subject: your love life. Perhaps you’ve tried online dating — a practice that, given the increasingly thorough integration of the internet and daily life, we’ll probably soon just call "dating." Perhaps you’ve had positive experiences with it, perhaps you’ve had negative ones, and most probably you’ve had a mixture of both, but how often can you take your mind off the awkward fact that you have to first "meet" the other person through an electronic medium, creating a version of yourself to suit that medium? Zizek calls this online dating’s problematic "aspect of self-commodification or self-manipulation." "When you date online," he says, "you have to present yourself there in a certain way, putting forward certain qualities. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions, even at the very simple level. I think the English term is ‘endearing foibles’ — an elementary ingredient in love. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element, and it is only through noticing this element that you say, ‘But in spite of that imperfection, I love him or her.'" Fair enough. But what to do about it? Zizek thinks that the way forward for romantic technologies lies not in a less technological approach, but a more technological approach — or at least a stranger technological approach. He imagines a world of "ideal sexual attraction" where "I meet a lady; we are attracted to each other; we say all the usual stuff — your place, my place, whatever, we meet there. What happens then? She comes with her plastic penis, electric dildo. I come with some horrible thing — I saw it, it’s called something like stimulating training unit — it’s basically a plastic vagina, a hole." Dare we examine where this scenario goes? The outcome may surprise you. They simply insert her electric dildo into his stimulating training unit, and voilà, "the machines are doing it for us, buzzing in the background, and I’m free to do whatever I want, and she." With full tribute paid to the superego by their vulgar devices, "we have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. I talk with a lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea, or she to me, quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today." Related Content: Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection Slavoj Žižek Calls Political Correctness a Form of "Modern Totalitarianism" Slavoj Žižek on the Feel-Good Ideology of Starbucks Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Slavoj Zizek​ Explains What’s Wrong with Online Dating & What Unconventional Technology Can Actually Improve Your Love Life 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.

Courtesy of Legion Magazine, you can hear Canada’s iconic singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen reading "In Flanders Fields" by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. The clip was recently recorded to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the poem. World War I inspired many poems. But this one, straight from the beginning, became one of the most popular ones. Poets.org recounts the origins of "In Flanders Fields" thusly: As the first shots of World War I were fired in the summer of 1914, Canada, as a member of the British Empire, became involved in the fight as well. [John] McCrae was appointed brigade-surgeon to the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. In April 1915, McCrae was stationed in the trenches near Ypres, Belgium, in an area known as Flanders, during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. In the midst of the tragic warfare, McCrae’s friend, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed by artillery fire and buried in a makeshift grave. The following day, McCrae, after seeing the field of makeshift graves blooming with wild poppies, wrote his famous poem "In Flanders Field," which would be the second to last poem he would ever write. It was published in England’s Punch magazine in December 1915 and was later included in the posthumous collection In Flanders Fields and Other Poems (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919). As a sad postscript, McCrae started suffering from asthma attacks and bronchitis in the summer of 1917, then died of pneumonia and meningitis in January of 1918. It’s fitting that Leonard Cohen (an accomplished poet before he became a musician) would recite "In Flanders Fields," the text of which you can read below. The second reading was recorded live in Los Angeles earlier this year. In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. Find Cohen’s reading in our collection, 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poetry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musician Began) Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musician Featured in a 1965 Documentary The Poetry of Leonard Cohen Illustrated by Two Short Films Leonard Cohen Reads The Great World War I Poem, "In Flanders Fields" 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 — kinetic artist extraordinaire and creator of the great "Page Turner" Rube Goldberg machine — returns with a new contraption: "The Dresser". Originally, "The Dresser" was a live performance piece that Herscher performed in Charlotte, NC. He spent a year building the contraption, then 2 months testing it, before staging it for audiences. (Watch a short documentary on the live performance here.) Now, thankfully, he brings the quirky device to the web, for the rest of us to see. Somewhere Rube Goldberg is smiling. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content: The Page Turner: A Fabulous Rube Goldberg Machine for Readers The Falling Water: A Rube Goldberg Machine That Makes a Fine Cocktail Students Tells the Passover Story with a Rube Goldberg Machine The Dresser: The Contraption That Makes Getting Dressed an Adventure 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.

Just last month, Stanford University‘s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts made its collection accessible online, digitizing and uploading over 45,000 of its works of art in forms freely viewable by all. These include, if you navigate through the collections highlighted on the browse page, works of American and European art; African, Native American, and Oceanic art; Asian art; modern and contemporary art; prints, drawings, and photographs; and Stanford family collections as well as works currently on display. But this hardly happened at a stroke. The short video above gives a look behind the scenes — or rather, museum walls, or perhaps digital museum walls — to reveal some of the effort that went into the six-year project that has culminated in the opening of the Cantor Arts Center’s online collections. The endeavor required no small amount of physical work, not just to re-photograph everything in their collections (only five percent of which goes on display at any one time), but to perform a whole new inventory, the first complete one the museum had done since 1916. (As a recent move reminded me, there’s nothing like having to move all your stuff from one place to another to give you the clearest possible sense of exactly what you have.) Here we’ve posted a few paintings from the Cantor: James McNeill Whistler’s Hurlingham (well, an etching, if you want to get technical), Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny’s View of the Bay of Naples, Nakabayashi Chikkei’s Autumn Landscape and Edward Hopper’s New York Corner. (You can also find a whole different set of scenes rendered in pen and ink at the Cantor’s dedicated digital collection of the sketchbooks of San Francisco Bay Area abstract expressionist painter Richard Diebenkorn.) But to get a sense of the full scope of the geographic, historical, aesthetic, and formal variety of the art the Cantor has made viewable anywhere and any time, you’ll want to follow the instructions provided by one of our readers, Robin L: "Go to this search gateway. If you enter in an artist (I tried Whistler), you will get a list of all of the collections’ images with small images and some basic information. Then click on the specific piece that you want. And that one will open up with a small-medium image and some description of the piece. If you click on the image again, it will enlarge."  via Stanford News Related Content: Whitney Museum Puts Online 21,000 Works of American Art, By 3,000 Artists The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use LA County Museum Makes 20,000 Artistic Images Available for Free Download The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online The Getty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Public Domain (and There’s More to Come) 40,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. 45,000 Works of Art from Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center Now Freely Viewable 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.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is perhaps best known for his systematic philosophical ethics, conceived of as a post-religious framework for secular morality. His primary ethical mandate, which he called the "categorical imperative," enables us—Alain de Botton tells us in his short School of Life video above—to "shift our perspective, to get us to see our own behavior in less immediately personal terms." It’s a philosophical version, de Botton says, of the Golden Rule. "Act only according to that maxim," Kant famously wrote of the imperative in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, "by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." This guide to moral behavior seems on its face a simple one. It asks us to imagine the consequences of behavior should everyone act in the same way. However, "almost every conceivable analysis of the Groundwork has been tried out over the past two centuries," writes Harvard professor Michael Rosen, "yet all have been found wanting in some way or other." Friedrich Nietzsche alluded to a serious problem with what Rosen calls Kant’s "rule-utilitarianism." How, Nietzsche asks in On the Genealogy of Morals, are we to determine whether an action will have good or bad consequences unless we have "learned to separate necessary events from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see distant events as if they were present, to anticipate them…." Can we ever have that kind of foresight? Can we formulate rules such that everyone who acts on them will predict the same positive or negative outcomes in every situation? The questions did not seem to personally disturb Kant, who lived his life in a highly predictable, rule-bound way—even, de Botton tells us, when it came to structuring his dinner parties. But while the categorical imperative has seemed unworkably abstract and too divorced from particular circumstances and contingencies, an elaboration of the maxim has had much more appeal to contemporary ethicists. We should also, Kant wrote, "act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means." De Botton provides some helpful context for why Kant felt the need to create these ethical principles. Kant lived in a time when "the identifying feature of his age was its growing secularism." De Botton contends that while Kant welcomed the decline of traditional religion, he also feared the consequences; as "a pessimist about human character," Kant "believed that we are by nature intensely prone to corruption." His solution was to "replace religious authority with the authority of reason." The project occupied all of Kant’s career, from his work on political philosophy to that on aesthetics in the Critique of Pure Judgment. And though philosophers have for centuries had difficulty making Kant’s ethics work, his dense, difficult writing has nevertheless occupied a central place in Western thought. In his defense of the authority of reason, Kant provided us with one of the most comprehensive means for understanding how exactly human reason works—and for recognizing its many limitations. To read Kant’s work for yourself, download free versions of his major texts in a variety of digital formats from our archive of Free Philosophy eBooks. Kant is no easy read, and it helps to have a guide. To learn how his work has been interpreted over the past two hundred years, and how he arrived at many of his conclusions, consider taking one of many online classes on Kant we have listed in our archive of Free Philosophy Courses. Related Content: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy in Russia Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Immanuel Kant’s Life & Philosophy Introduced in a Short Monty Python-Style 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.

Briefly noted: This fall, Harvard has been rolling out videos from the 2015 edition of Computer Science 50 (CS50), the university’s introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a perennially popular professor (you’ll immediately see why), the one-semester course (taught mostly in C) combines courses typically known elsewhere as "CS1" and "CS2." Even if you’re not a Harvard student, you’re welcome to follow CS50 online by heading over to the This is CS50 website, or this alternative site here. There you will find video lectures (stream them all above or access them individually here), problem sets, quizzes, and other useful course materials. Once you’ve mastered the material covered in CS50, you can start branching out into new areas of coding by perusing our big collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. 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. Learn to Code with Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science Course: The 2015 Edition is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I’ve been playing guitar off and on for most of my life, and I’d be the first to admit that I’m not the most spectacular musician. I do it for joy and don’t sweat my musical limitations too much. This is a good thing; otherwise I might find myself seething with mad envy—like F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri—upon realizing that in 15 lifetimes I’d never be as good as young French prodigy Tina S is at 15 years of age. Tina has sent guitar nerds everywhere fleeing to their bedrooms, working their fingers bloody in furious efforts to match her speed and accuracy. Watch her flawlessly rip through Yngwie Malmsteen’s "Arpeggios from Hell" above, ye mighty shredders, and despair. See her destroy Steve Vai’s "Paganini 5th Caprice (Crossroads)" below, ye monsters of rock, and rend your denim vests asunder with grief. The baroque speed metal of Malmsteen and Vai aren’t really my bag, but I have to say, there’s maybe a little Salieri voice cackling into the void in the back of my mind when I watch Tina’s videos. Maybe she’s a one-trick-pony, it tells me, playing arpeggios all day like a few hundred other guitarists in the audition line for a hundred metal bands in a hundred cities a day—players who couldn’t slow down and play the blues if they were heavily medicated. So says my inner Salieri. But no, there she is below, flawlessly pulling off the "Comfortably Numb" solo, her bends and slides so impeccably timed I could close my eyes and almost swear it’s David Gilmour. Sigh and alas. But can she do Van Halen, you rightly ask? Because, you know, anyone can play Malmsteen, Vai, and Gilmour, but Eddie Van Halen, c’mon…. Yet there she is below, with a searing rendition of "Eruption," a song guitarists who learn Van Halen often avoid for reasons that will likely become evident when you see Tina play it. Is she too much technique, too little soul, you say? Yeah, well, she’s 15, and better than most of us are at twice that age. Comments on her videos include the following: "I want to throw my guitar out the window" and "This makes me want to kill myself." In all seriousness, I hope anyone who genuinely feels this way seeks help. Also in all seriousness, don’t despair. Do what you do and enjoy it. And maybe after many long lifetimes you’ll be reborn as a Parisian guitar prodigy. That Tina S has obvious natural ability in no way means she hasn’t had to work hard for this level of skill. On the contrary, anyone this good gets there through endless regular practice and the guidance of a talented teacher (in this case, French guitarist Renaud Louis-Servais). Tina posted her first video in 2008 at the tender age of 8, playing a composition by guitarist Maria Linnemann. You can see her below honing the classical chops that she later put to ludicrously fast use on a metal tribute to Vivaldi. But does she do Mozart? Not so far on her Youtube channel, where you’ll find more early acoustic performances, like "Let it Be" and "Hotel California," and more recent shredfests like Jason Becker’s "Altitudes." To learn just how Tina views her own musicianship and sees her future as a guitarist, read this interview with her on the Guitar Channel. "I have not yet started my career as a guitarist," she deadpans. Many would-be Salieris have already sworn to end theirs after watching her videos. Related Content: Fourteen-Year-Old Girl’s Blistering Heavy Metal Performance of Vivaldi Great Violinists Playing as Kids: Itzhak Perlman, Anne-Sophie Mutter, & More The Guitar Prodigy from Karachi Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 15-Year-Old French Guitar Prodigy Flawlessly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yngwie Malmsteen & Steve Vai 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.

Blank on Blank has worked their magic again, this time animating a 1968 interview with the singer-songwriter and civil rights activist, Nina Simone. As always, Blank on Blank’s visual work is a treat. But what stands out for me here is the audio recording. Taken from a 1960s radio show hosted by Lilian Terry, the audio originally aired in Italy in the 1960s. And, until now, it has never been heard in the United States. Terry is nowadays working on an audiobook project called Voices from the Jazz Dimension that "chronicles her remarkable collection of interviews with jazz legends from Nina to Duke Ellington." We can hardly wait for that project to take final shape. You can find more Blank on Blank animations, all of which revive vintage audio clips, in our archive. Related Content: Nina Simone Sings Her Breakthrough Song, ‘I Loves You Porgy,’ in 1962 Free Archive of Audio Interviews with Rock, Jazz & Folk Legends Now on iTunes Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Classic Jazz Videos (and Much More)     Watch a New Nina Simone Animation Based on an Interview Never Aired in the U.S. Before 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.

At the epicenter of three explosive forces in 1950s America—the birth of Bebop, the spread of Buddhism through the counterculture, and Beat revolutionizing of poetry and prose—sat Jack Kerouac, though I don’t picture him ever sitting for very long. The rhythms that moved through him, through his verse and prose, are too fluid to come to rest. At the end of his life he sat… and drank, a mostly spent force. But in his prime, Kerouac was always on the move, over highways on those legendary road trips, or his fingers flying over the typewriter’s keys as he banged out the scroll manuscript of On the Road in three feverish weeks (so he said). After the publication of On the Road, Kerouac "became a celebrity," says Steve Allen in introduction to the Beat writer on a 1959 appearance above, "partly because he’d written a powerful and successful book, but partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation." After a little back-and-forth, Allen lets Kerouac do what he always did so well, whether on television or on record—embody the rhythms of his writing in his voice, his phrasing always musical, whether he read over jazz hot or cool or over meditative silence. He did a lot of both, recording with Allen and many other jazzmen, and "experimenting with a home reel-to-reel system, taping himself to see whether his spontaneous prose outbursts had the musical rhythms F. Scott Fitzgerald considered the hallmark of all great writing." So writes historian David Brinkley in the liner notes (remember those?) to the compilation album Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, a rare collection of haunting poetry readings, playful crooning, and experiments with voice and music. Brinkley describes how Kerouac, the French Canadian from Lowell, Massachusetts, developed his "bop ear" by hanging out at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in the 40s, watching Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie invent what he called a "goofy new sound." The sound stayed with him, as he turned his immersion into American literary and musical counterculture into On the Road, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, etc, and throughout all the writing, there was the music of his reading, captured on the albums Poetry for the Beat Generation with Steve Allen, Blues and Haikus with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims—both in 1959—and, the following year, Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s reading style did not come only from his internalization of bebop rhythms, however, but also from "the discovery of the extraordinary spoken-word albums of poets Langston Hughes, Carl Sandberg, and Dylan Thomas," Brinkley tells us. The writer became "convinced that prose should be read aloud in public, as it had been in Homer’s Greece and Shakespeare’s England." The albums he recorded and released in his lifetime bear out this conviction and explore "the possibilities of combining jazz and spontaneous verse." These records became very difficult to find for many years, but you can now purchase an omnibus CD at a reasonable price (vinyl will set you back a couple hundred bucks). Alternately, you can stream all three Kerouac albums free on Spotify, above in chronological order of release. If you don’t have Spotify, you can easily download the software here. And if you’d rather hear Kerouac’s readings on CD or on the original vinyl medium, that’s cool too. However you experience these readings, you should, at some point, experience them. Like all the very best poetry, Kerouac’s work is most alive when read aloud, and most especially when read aloud by Kerouac himself. Related Content: Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose Jack Kerouac Lists 9 Essentials for Writing Spontaneous Prose The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading "Howl" (1956) Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness   Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken-World Albums: A Sublime Union of Beat Literature and 1950s Jazz 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.

To understand the two sides of Steve Martin’s performing talents, check out his one and only hit single, 1978’s King Tut. On the A-side was the novelty funk hit about the Egyptian boy king. On the B-side, two deep cuts that showed off Martin’s formidable Americana/banjo chops: the traditional "Sally Goodin" (circa 1860, but existing on recordings since 1922), and "Hoedown at Alice’s" an original written for his then stand-up manager Bill McEuen’s wife. It’s not what you’d expect from the "Wild and Crazy Guy," but Martin’s banjo had always been a part of his act. He taught himself at 15 years old, playing along very slowly to Earl Scruggs records. He told an interviewer: The reason I played it on stage is because my act was so crazy I thought it’s probably good to show the audience I can do something that looks hard, because this act looks like I’m just making it up. I really wasn’t. I worked very hard on it. Which is a long way of saying: When Martin recorded an album of banjo favorites in 2009, The Crow, won a Grammy without relying on a single joke, then enlisted the help of the North Carolinian Steep Canyon Rangers to go on a tour, it should not have really been a surprise. When he teamed up next with The Steep Canyon Rangers and recorded Rare Bird Alert in 2011, Martin started to combine comedy and music once again, and with this above novelty song, he gets to indulge in the beautiful harmony singing that bluegrass groups like The Stanley Brothers, The Louvin Brothers, and the Osbourne Brothers made so popular in the mid-century. (There wasn’t just banjo pickin’ on those LPs, you know.) The above appearance on Letterman is a great rendition of a concert favorite, "Atheists Don’t Have No Songs." So in this month of arguments over the Starbucks holiday cup, let Mr. Martin and group add a palliative to any hurt atheist feelings. You guys rock. P.S. Martin got a chance to play with his hero on the same late-night program. Related Content Steve Martin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Einstein & Picasso in a Heady Comedy Routine (2002) Steve Martin on the Legendary Bluegrass Musician Earl Scruggs Steve Martin Releases Bluegrass Album/Animated Video A Bluegrass Version of Metallica’s Heavy Metal Hit, "Enter Sandman" Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. King Tut was the second 45 he ever bought as a kid. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Steve Martin Writes a Hymn for Hymn-Less Atheists 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.

When we think of a science fiction, most of us doubtless think of a Star Trek. Since the original series made its television debut almost a half-century ago, the speculative future it created has come to stand, in many minds, as the very model of the science-fictional enterprise (as it were). But the institution of Star Trek in all its forms — TV shows, movies, movies made out of TV shows, novels, video games, action figures, and so on — still has its detractors, and back at the very beginning it hardly looked like a sure success. Geek.com’s list of five things that nearly killed off Star Trek includes a failed pilot, a near-firing of Leonard Nimoy, and the words of no less a science-fiction titan than Isaac Asimov. "Star Trek," wrote its creator Gene Roddenberry in 1966, "almost did not get on the air because it refused to do juvenile science fiction, because it refused to put a ‘Lassie’ aboard the space ship, and because it insisted on hiring Dick Matheson, Harlan Ellison, A.E. Van Vogt, Phil Farmer, and so on." This came as part of a response to Asimov, who, in a TV Guide article entitled "What Are a Few Galaxies Among Friends?," criticized Star Trek for getting the science wrong. He cites, for example, a line about a gaseous cloud "one-half light year outside the Galaxy," which he likens to "saying a house is one-half yard outside the Mississippi Basin." Measurement flubs aside, Star Trek, despite its cancellation after three seasons, had become so big by the early 1970s that its fans had begun to put on whole conventions dedicated to the show. You can see in the clip above one such event in 1973, which provides proof that even Asimov had turned fan. He speaks of his appreciation for the show three times during the video, now describing Star Trek as the "sanest" and "most meaningful" program of its kind, one that "tackled real social problems," was "not devoted entirely to adventure," and had "fully realized characters" (citing Mr. Spock as Exhibit A). He may still have objected to the infamous split infinitive "to boldly go" (once a nitpicker, always a nitpicker), but he still thought the show "really presented the brotherhood of intelligence." After Asimov wrote his initial critique in TV Guide, he and Gene Roddenberry exchanged letters, and the two formidable sci-fi minds became friends and even collaborators thereafter. A 1967 Time magazine profile described Asimov as "batting out books on a new electric typewriter, emerging only occasionally to watch Star Trek (his favorite TV show)," and he went on to become an advisor to the show. A Letters of Note post on Roddenberry and Asimov’s correspondence contains a 1967 exchange wherein they put their heads together to solve the problem of how to give Captain Kirk lines as good as the ones that naturally go to a more unusual character like Spock. Since Asimov also contributed original ideas to the show, after having gone on record as a fan, I wonder: does that mean, in some sense, that Isaac Asimov wrote Star Trek fan fiction? Related Content: Klingon for English Speakers: Sign Up for a Free Course Coming Soon Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014 Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio Isaac Asimov Explains the Origins of Good Ideas & Creativity in Never-Before-Published Essay Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story "The Last Question" Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. How Isaac Asimov Went from Star Trek Critic to Star Trek Fan & Advisor 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 the early 20th century, the visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller started looking for ways to improve human shelter by: Applying modern technological know-how to shelter construction. Making shelter more comfortable and efficient. Making shelter more economically available to a greater number of people. And what he came up with (read more here) was the "geodesic" dome." This dome held appeal for two main reasons: 1.) its surface would be "omnitriangulated," meaning built out of small triangles, which would give the overall structure unparalleled strength. And 2.) domes by their very nature enclose the greatest volume for the least surface area, which makes them very efficient. Fuller developed the mathematics for the geodesic dome and helped make it an architectural reality. You can find instances where these domes served as auditoriums, weather observatories, and storage facilities in the US and Canada. And then above, you watch a documentary called A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome. Shot by Evan Mather in 2010, the documentary tells the story of the dome built in Baton Rouge, LA in 1958. At 384 feet in diameter, the Union Tank Car Dome was the world’s largest free-span structure then in existence. Mather’s documentary includes " interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition." It was funded by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and you can now find it our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Visit handcraftedfilms.com for more info on Mather’s film and/or to purchase the DVD. Related Content Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975) Watch an Animated Buckminster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About "the Geodesic Life" Better Living Through Buckminster Fuller’s Utopian Designs: Revisit the Dymaxion Car, House, and Map Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More The Life & Times of Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome: A Documentary 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 holidays can be hard, starting in October when the red and green decorations begin muscling in on the Halloween aisle. Most Wonderful Time of the Year, you say? Oh, go stuff a stocking in it, Andy Williams! The majority of us have more in common with the Grinch, Scrooge, and/or the Little Match Girl. Still, it’s hard to resist the preternaturally mature 11-year-old Björk reading the nativity story in her native Icelandic, backed by unsmiling older kids from the Children’s Music School in Reykjavík. Particularly since I myself do not speak Icelandic. The fact that it’s in black and white is merely the blueberries on the spiced cabbage. It speaks highly of the Icelandic approach to education that a principal’s office regular who reportedly chafed at her school’s "retro, constant Beethoven and Bach bollocks" curriculum was awarded the plum part in this 1976 Christmas special for the National Broadcasting Service. It would also appear that little Björk, the fiercely self-reliant latchkey kid of a Bohemian single mother, was far and away the most charismatic kid enrolled in the Barnamúsikskóli. (Less than a year later her self-titled first album sold 7000 copies in Iceland—a modest amount compared to Adele’s debut, maybe, but c’mon, the kid was 11! And Iceland’s population at the time was a couple hundred thousand and change.) As to the above performance’s religious slant, it wasn’t a reflection of her personal beliefs. As she told the UK music webzine Drowned in Sound in 2011: …nature is my religion, in a way… I think everybody has their own private religion. I guess what bothers me is when millions have the same one. It just can’t be true. It’s just…what? Still, it probably wasn’t too controversial that the programmers elected to cleave to the reason in the season. Icelandic church attendance may be low-key, but the overwhelming majority of its citizens identify as Lutheran, or some other Christian denomination. (They also believe in elves and 13 formerly fearsome Yule Lads, descendants of the ogres Grýla and Leppalúði. By the time Björk appeared on earth, they had long since evolved, through a combination of foreign influence and public decree, into the kinder, gentler, not quite Santa-esque version, addressing the studio audience at the top of the act.) Related Content: 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 Presents Groundbreaking Experimental Musicians on the BBC’s Modern Minimalists (1997) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She is proud to originated the role of Santa’s mortal consort, Mary, in her Jewish husband Greg Kotis’ Nordic-themed holiday fantasia, The Truth About Santa. Follow her @AyunHalliday Watch Björk, Age 11, Read a Christmas Nativity Story on a 1976 Icelandic TV Special 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.

Take a look at the live performance above of a Johann Sebastian Bach chaconne. See that monstrous stringed instrument in the back? The one that looks like a movie prop? It’s real, and it’s called the octobass, a triple bass made in 1850 by prolific French instrument maker and inventor Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, whom German violin maker Corilon calls "the most significant violin maker of modern times." The huge instrument can play a full octave below the standard double bass and create sound down to 16 Hz, at the lowest threshold of human hearing and into the realm of what’s called infrasound. The octobass is so large that players have to stand on a platform, and use special keys on the side of the instrument to change the strings’ pitch since the neck is far too high to reach. (See this photo of a young boy dwarfed by an octobass for scale.) One of two playable replicas of the original three octobasses Vuillaume made resides at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, AZ. In the video above, MIM curator Colin Pearson gets us up close to the gargantuan bass, created, he tells us, to "add a low end rumble to any large orchestra." That it does. The description of the video just below advises you to "turn up your subs" to hear the demonstration by Nico Abondolo, double bass player of the LA Chamber orchestra. (Abondolo is also principle bass for several Hollywood orchestras, and he came to MIM to record samples of the octobass for the Hunger Games soundtrack.) As you’ll see in the video, the octobass is so massive, it takes five people to move it. Abondolo plays the octobass with both his fingers and with the 3-stringed instrument’s specially made bow, and demonstrates its system of keys and levers. "Playing the instrument is a twofold, or maybe threefold physical exertion," he remarks. It’s also a journey into a past where "people were as crazy, or crazier about music than we are now." Perhaps needless to say, the instrument’s bulk and the awkward physical movements required to play it mean that it cannot be played at faster tempos. And if the first thing that comes to mind when you hear Abondolo strum those low bass notes is the theme from Jaws, you’re not alone. A number of other musicians visiting the octobass at MIM took the opportunity to goof around on the comically oversized bass and play their versions of the ominous shark approach music (above). You won’t get the full effect of the instrument unless you’re listening with a quality subwoofer with a very low bass response, and even then, almost no sub—consumer or pro—can handle the lowest pitch the octobass is capable of producing. But if you were to stand in the same room while someone played the huge triple bass, you’d certainly feel its lowest register rumbling through you. via Laughing Squid Related Content: The Story of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music History in 8 Minutes 100 Great Bass Riffs Played in One Epic Take: Covers 60 Years of Rock, Jazz and R&B Jazz Legend Jaco Pastorius Gives a 90 Minute Bass Lesson and Plays Live in Montreal (1982) The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Musicians Play Bach & the Jaws Theme on the Octobass, the Gargantuan String Instrument Invented in 1850 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.

Here at Open Culture, we can’t get enough of the Chelsea Hotel, which means we can’t get enough of the Chelsea Hotel in a certain era, at the height of a certain cultural moment in New York history. Though it struggled as a business for years after it first opened as an apartment building in 1884 and changed hands left and right until the 1970s, it hit its stride as an icon when a certain critical mass of well-known (or soon to be well known) musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, and otherwise colorful personalities had put in time there. One such musician, writer, artist in other media, and colorful personality indeed has an especially strong association with the Chelsea: Patti Smith. You may remember our post back in 2012 featuring Smith reading her final letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, which she included in Just Kids, her acclaimed memoir of her friendship with the controversial photographer. For a time, Smith and Mapplethorpe lived in the Chelsea together, and in the footage above, shot in 1970 by a German documentary film crew, you can see them there in their natural habitat. "The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in The Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe," Smith writes in Just Kids. "Everyone had something to offer and nobody seemed to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums." These fifteen minutes of film also includes glimpses into a variety of other lives lived at the Chelsea as the 1970s began. If you’d like to see more of the place at its cultural zenith — made possible by the state of 70s New York itself, which had infamously hit something of a nadir — have a look at the clip we featured in 2013 of the Velvet Underground’s Nico singing "Chelsea Girls" there. Just after the 70s had gone, BBC’s Arena turned up to shoot a documentary of their own, which we featured last year. Smith has long since left the Chelsea, and Mapplethorpe has long since left this world, but even now, as the hotel undergoes extensive renovations that began in 2011, some of those "extravagant bums" remain. via Please Kill Me Related Content: New York’s Famous Chelsea Hotel and Its Creative Residents Revisited in a 1981 Documentary Nico Sings "Chelsea Girls" in the Famous Chelsea Hotel Iggy Pop Conducts a Tour of New York’s Lower East Side, Circa 1993 Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Her Dear Friend Robert Mapplethorpe The Life and Controversial Work of Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe Profiled in 1988 Documentary Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Vintage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Living at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970) 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.

Back in October, we helped break the news that you could watch the entire first season of Bob Ross’s beloved TV show, The Joy of Painting, free online. Now can you add another 70 complete episodes to your media queue (roughly 20% of the show’s entire catalogue), all pulled from different seasons that aired between 1983 and 1994. Just call up this playlist from Bob’s official YouTube channel, or start streaming the videos above. If you sit tight for 35 hours, you’ll learn how to paint Misty Rolling Hills, Lazy Rivers, Twilight Meadows, Mountain Streams, Peaceful Valleys and other idyllic scenes. As The New York Times points out this week, 20 years after Bob’s untimely death, there’s now a strange revival of Bob Ross in full swing. And thanks to his YouTube channel, you can get swept up in the mania anytime you like. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that every Monday night is "Bob Ross Night" on Twitch.com. According to Twitch’s blog, "Every Monday, we will be running one season of The Joy of Painting on /bobross starting at 3pm PST and ending at 9:30pm PST. There are 31 seasons, so repeats will happen only once every seven months." Tune in for these marathons here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content   45,000 Works of Art from Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center Now Freely Viewable Online The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use 70 Complete Episodes of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting Now Free to Watch 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.

"Doing experiments with household items makes science accessible to the masses." - Don Herbert This picture was taken in 1998 when Don Herbert received an honorary doctorate from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. I was invited to speak at his ceremony as we celebrated a man and his passion for inspiring young minds to learn more about science. A reporter from the Smithsonian Magazine contacted me several months ago wanting to talk the influential role Mr. Wizard played in shaping and molding my career as a professional science communicator today. Don Herbert paved the way for many of us who find great joy in communicating the wonders of science to public audiences whether it’s at our local museum, a science festival or even a television talkshow. Here’s a classic clip from Don Herbert’s original Watch Mr. Wizard show, circa 1952. Here’s the strange thing… I never saw an original Mr. Wizard Show on television during the 1950s or 60s. I’m one of those kids who grew up in the 70s when science was something you studied in school. It wasn’t until 1990 (I was in my mid 20s) that I watched Mr. Wizard’s World on cable television and I truly understood the depth of his Mr. Wizard’s genius. While it was easy to be mesmerized by the kooky science demonstrations, I was drawn to watching and learning from the techniques Don Herbert used to engage his "helpers" and the viewers watching at home. His style was calm and laid back. The focus was on the curiosity at hand and not one-liners or goofy bits of business. Yet, his experiments and the experiences he created were so entertaining. Don Herbert understood the science of engagement. In 1991 I was approached by NBC television to host a science segment on a program called News for Kids. Remember, this was pre "Bill Nye the Science Guy" or "Beakman’s World." As I worked with the producers and writers to plan the look and feel of the segment, something inside told me to find Don Herbert and see if he might give me some advice. In this pre-internet age, the search tool of choice was the phone, and it took about two days to finally track him down. Don was so kind and generous with his time on the phone, and his advice truly surprised me. "Don’t let them put you in a lab coat if you don’t want to look like a doctor or research scientist… just be yourself," Mr. Wizard told me with real conviction in his voice. "Kids don’t want to see a character… they want to see someone who is genuinely excited about the science you’re presenting. If you’re excited, they will be excited… and that’s the greatest gift you can ever give someone." But the most important piece of advice Mr. Wizard ever gave me was this… "Don’t ever let the gee-whiz over-shadow the content you’re trying to teach." In other words, it’s so easy to get caught up in the erupting foam or exploding egg or bubbling concoction that you forget to actually teach some science. "Use the gee-whiz to grab their attention and then do something meaningful with it." I was excited to follow-up with Don and share some of the episodes from my science segment on News for Kids that were inspired by the man himself. A popular guest on the Johnny Carson Show and later on David Letterman, Don Herbert was truly an inspiration to an entire generation of science enthusiasts and career scientists. This video is from David Letterman’s first show on NBC in 1982 when Mr. Wizard was a guest. You’ll notice that Don isn’t wearing a goofy tie-dye lab coat pretending to be a zany character. Instead, he’s just a guy who is passionate about sharing the wonders of science. If I tried to recreate any of these experiment on television today, producers would be eager to make the demonstrations bigger with more wow-factor and pizzazz. Yet, there’s something really cool about just sharing the experiment. Take a look… A large collection of his documents and photos were recently donated to the Archives Center of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History by Herbert’s step-daughter and her husband, Kristen and Tom Nikosey. A small selection from the archive is on display through October 2, 2015, in the museum’s newly renovated west wing, but the bulk of the materials are available by appointment. Read the entire article from the Smithsonian Magazine entitled Meet Mr. Wizard, Television’s Original Science Guy. Read the article from Speaker Magazine from February 2012…   The post How Mr. Wizard Inspired Me - A Conversation with Smithsonian Magazine appeared first on Steve Spangler.

And the question of the day is:Do you teach your students how to accept change?All 'hows', 'whys', and 'what-fors' graciously appreciated. Would love to hear how this applies to different subjects and different ages. Share your thoughts.

by John T. Spencerwhat was once a solitary work became collectiveI've written a few non-fiction teacher works before, but only recently did I take up the challenge of writing novel.  I'm in the editing phase now and I've noticed a few things about social media and this process.  These are a few random, scattered thoughts about how social media has changed what I had once seen as a solitary effort in writing a novel:The BenefitsTwitter has helped me learn to use language more sparingly.  Something about the brevity of the medium has pushed me away from meandering too far.  The bizarre thing is that I'm actually more astute at using better vocabulary, because Twitter is closer to poetry than prose. I found my voice in writing blogs.  Something about the daily feedback from readers helped me figure out how to say what I want to say in a way that is distinctly me.  Fortunately for me, my blog has never been intensely popular and has grown slowly over the years, allowing me to take risks and experiment along the way.I have a built-in "audience" from my PLN (my blog and Twitter followers) who have a sense of what I will write before I put it on paper.   When I've needed advice on book covers, I've had an instant pool of comments and questions, if a few people in particular helping me to refine my ideas. I've had help in writing my content.  For example, I posted the first three chapters and within one night I had six people offering feedback.  They all shared a similar perspective and honestly it saved my novel.  A few times I've actually tweeted a line from the book and watched the response.  The last line of the book was one such tweet. The DrawbacksI struggled at first with the narrative format, partially because people lose patience fast on blogs while they want to build anticipation with a story.  Even in the editing phase, I'm trying to figure this out.  Although blogs allowed me to find my voice, they have also unintentionally led me to a place where I'm either a commentator or expert.  Figuring out how to tell the story rather than comment on it has been a challenge due to social media.  Social media (and Twitter in particular) tends to be focussed on innovation.  Often, this pushes us toward the pursuit of novelty.  Writing an enduring story that is not bound to the current context proved harder than I thought.  Sometimes I had to avoid the feedback of readers (including one who warned me that kids don't like a story that sounds dark) and trust my classroom experience instead.  Twitter can be distracting.  There were times I had an idea for the novel and instead I chose Twitter.  My mentor once gave me the advice, "We must seize the moment of excited curiosity for the acquisition of wisdom."  In other words, if I put off an idea until another day, I lose the beauty of the moment and struggle to put it on paper. 

by Shelly Sanchez TerrellPart 1 of the Education Transformation Through Collaborative Voices seriesSocial media is having an incredible impact on various aspects of our lives. Recently, CNN and the Huffington Post reported the impact of social media during the recent tragedies that have struck Japan. The underlying message was that social media has allowed people to communicate important messages through powerful real-time images and sharing their experiences. With Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube alone we have the ability to spread a message and impact an audience of millions worldwide. We have the ability to impact our world in a positive manner. Visuals are powerful as are stories shared through multimedia. In a series of posts, we will explore various ways to spread a message through various social networks in order to transform current education systems. This is also research for an upcoming Keynote that I will be giving for the Plymouth E-Learning Conference in April.Why Try to Spread Your Message?Education is one of those hot topics. Everyone has an opinion because everyone has experience with the education system. Powerful stories and messages are already being heard by millions regarding education. You have heard the ones spread by Oprah, Michelle Rhee, John Legend, and various presidents, prime ministers, and leaders worldwide. These are the most prominent messages that have impacted wide audiences. Waiting for Superman was a documentary heard by millions that basically shared powerful stories. The audience was motivated by these stories to act. Education policy was impacted by the stories shared in this documentary.What is missing is the voices of educators who are already transforming the way their students learn. We live in educator communities where we witness the beauty of what our colleagues are accomplishing with their students, but outside this community lies the general public and people who decide education policy and they rarely hear about the amazing learning taking place. We need for the stories of educators impacting education in a positive way to go viral and drown out the other voices negatively impacting education policy and hindering transformation.Collaborative Voices on VideoIn 2005 YouTube was created and is still one of the best tools for spreading a message. Web Monitoring reports that in 2010 Youtube exceeded 2 billion views a day which is double the prime-time audience of all 3 major US broadcast networks combined. Educators have a free powerful tool that attracts audiences worldwide to spread their messages about what they believe learning should look like.Can an educator's video go viral or even be heard by large audiences? Yes! Scott Mcleod's and Karl Fisch's Shift Happens videos have been seen by over 20 million people worldwide. Their message about the importance of effective technology integration has impacted many schools worldwide.So how do you spread your message through video?Define your vision and determine your messageIt must be succinct, clear, and powerfulAsk a group of educators to help you support your visionOrganize this through a Ning, Wiki, or Google Doc Combine with a nice video/audio editor (I recommend Camtasia)Add creative commons musicHave each contributor spread it like fire in presentations, through blogs and social networks, in e-mails to colleagues, or in the staff newsletterMake it available for anyone to download and upload through a Creative Commons LicenseUpload in various video channels including Youtube, BlipTV, and VimeoExamples of Collaborative VideosMy We Connect Project with various versions seen in various countries Daniel Pink's What's Your Sentence? video is seen by over 12,000 worldwideEric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - 'Lux Aurumque' is seen by millions worldwideMy newest collaborative project to spread the word about our free online Reform Symposium e-conference to get a wider audience to hear more messagesWhat message will you attempt to spread to transform education?