//www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpuXfQHB6MM In 1986, Yoko Ono commissioned the Oscar-winning animator John Canemaker to bring to life the drawings and doodles of John Lennon (1940-1980), culminating in the release of a short film called The John Lennon Sketchbook. Almost 30 years later, that film has now been officially released on YouTube. A product of Liverpool’s art schools, John Lennon drew throughout his life, illustrating two of his books with playful drawings, and drawing Christmas Cards for Oxfam, just to cite two examples. You can see Lennon’s visual talents on full display in The John Lennon Sketchbook, a short animation that is pretty whimsical and fun — until the very end, when Lennon seemingly predicts his own violent death in the audio recording that serves as the film’s soundtrack. The John Lennon Sketchbook will be added to the Animation section of our larger collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..  via Cartoon Brew Related Content: I Met the Walrus: An Animated Film Revisiting a Teenager’s 1969 Interview with John Lennon The Beatles: Why Music Matters in Two Animated Minutes John Lennon Illustrates Two of His Books with Playful Drawings (1964-1965) Bed Peace Revisits John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Vietnam Protests The John Lennon Sketchbook, a Short Animation Featuring Lennon’s Drawings, Premieres on YouTube is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post The John Lennon Sketchbook, a Short Animation Featuring Lennon’s Drawings, Premieres on YouTube appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-dHxJNsxJc It seems perfectly natural to us that animation is a medium dominated by cel-by-cel drawings, whether made with paint and brush or mouse and software. But it might have been otherwise. After all, some animated films and videos have been made in less conventional formats with less conventional materials. In the past, we’ve featured here stop-motion animations made with dead bugs, innovative pinscreen animations, unusual cutout animations, and the "destructive animation" of painted plaster. And today, we bring you the live-action sand animation of Hungarian artist Ferenc Cakó, who projects his work on a screen for a theatrical audience. These more sculptural forms may be more painstaking than traditional cel animation, and for that reason more rare, but they are also often much more interesting. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=go7wlUOC5dg Cakó performs his "sand animations," all over the world, to the accompaniment of classical compositions like Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major and Orff’s Carmina Burana. Here we have his animated interpretation of the most well-known work of Vivaldi, the Four Seasons ("Spring" and "Summer" above, "Autumn" and "Winter" below.) The effect of Cakó’s live technique is mesmerizing; his hands and arms break the fourth wall in broad gestures under which successions of images take shape. His sand drawings tend to be rather static—instead the animated elements in Cakó’s sand animations are his hands as he pushes the sand around, rapidly forming it into faces, flocks of birds, angry clouds. These are quickly wiped away and remade into trees, frightened horses, solitary shepherds…. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCEB4v3o-50 Watching him work raises many a question: Is Cakó using from storyboards? (No.) How much of his live animation does he improvise? (A good deal.) And why sand, anyway? (It’s dry.) You will find more comprehensive answers to these questions and many more in an interview posted on Cakó’s website. Alluding to the difficulty of his work, compounded by its performative aspect, Cakó says, "Sand cannot be corrected, so while working I do not have control, no motion control. I do not have any opportunity, which cartoonists do, such as the tracing paper phase, during which they either draw the lines or scan them in the computer." In other words, this is uniquely difficult art that requires the skills of a uniquely confident artist. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGS6uSPGqvo Cakó’s website also contains photos of the artist at work, a biography that is also a film-, art-, and performance-ography, and a page devoted specifically to scripting "the way Mr Cakó should be announced," complete with inexplicable uses of parentheses. It’s a fitting bit of bravado for an artist who has legally copyrighted his process. (Ladies and Gentlemen, what you shall see tonight, is a) Live Sand Animation Performance, created by Mr Cako, right here by his hands, to the rhythm of the music. (on the stage and on the screen…….. Mr Ferenc Cako!) See many more "sandanimations"—and "paint animations"—at Cakó’s YouTube channel. Related Content: Watch The Amazing 1912 Animation of Stop-Motion Pioneer Ladislas Starevich, Starring Dead Bugs Nikolai Gogol’s Classic Story, "The Nose," Animated With the Astonishing Pinscreen Technique (1963) Watch Piotr Dumala’s Wonderful Animations of Literary Works by Kafka and Dostoevsky Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Brought to Life in Sand Animations by the Hungarian Artist Ferenc Cakó is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Brought to Life in Sand Animations by the Hungarian Artist Ferenc Cakó appeared first on Open Culture.

Click image, then click again, to enlarge Call it counterintuitive clickbait if you must, but Forbes’ Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry made an intriguing argument when he granted the title of "Language of the Future" to French, of all tongues. "French isn’t mostly spoken by French people and hasn’t been for a long time now," he admits," but "the language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050. One study "even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin." I don’t know about you, but I can never believe in any wave of the future without a traceable past. But the French language has one, of course, and a long and storied one at that. You see it visualized in the information graphic above (also available in suitable-for-framing prints!) created by Minna Sundberg, author of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent. "When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor," writes Mental Floss’ Arika Okrent. "An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian)." Sundberg takes this tree metaphor to a delightfully lavish extreme, tracing, say, how Indo-European linguistic roots sprouted a variety of modern-day living languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Italian — and, of course, our Language of the Future. The size of the branches and bunches of leaves represent the number of speakers of each language at different times: the likes of English and Spanish have sprouted into mighty vegetative clusters, while others, like, Swedish, Dutch, and Punjabi, assert a more local dominance over their own, separately grown regional branches. Will French’s now-modest leaves one day cast a shadow over the whole tree? Perhaps — but I’m not canceling my plans to attend Spanish practice group tonight. via Mental Floss Related Content: Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation Noam Chomsky Talks About How Kids Acquire Language & Ideas in an Animated Video by Michel Gondry Stephen Fry Gets Animated about Language Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQVrMzWtqgU In the past, the good folks over at Blank on Blank have turned rarely-seen interviews with the likes of Ray Bradbury and John Coltrane into brilliant little animated shorts. This week, their latest installment is on Ayn Rand. Rand, of course, is the mind behind Objectivism, the patron saint of laissez faire capitalism, and the author of such unwieldy tomes as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Among Wall Street bankers, Washington conservatives and insufferable college sophomores, Rand is a revered figure. Former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and presidential candidate Rand Paul are both acknowledged followers. Former Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan was Rand’s protégé. To a lot of other people, of course, her theories are little more than a shrill justification of sociopathy, an empathy-challenged vision of social interaction that flies in the face of basic ideas of human decency. The interview dates back to a 1959 interview by Mike Wallace (see the original here) who grills Rand on her concept of love and happiness, which leads to this exchange: Ayn Rand: I say that man is entitled to his own happiness. And that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy. And nor should he wish to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others. I hold that man should have self-esteem. Mike Wallace: And cannot man have self-esteem if he loves his fellow man? Christ, every important moral leader in man’s history, has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral? Ayn Rand: It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself. It is more than immoral, it’s impossible. Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately. That is to love people without any standard. To love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody. Watching the piece, I kept hearing the title of Raymond Carver’s brilliant short story run through my mind, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." (Hear Carver read that story here.) My sense is that her version of love is very different from mine. Watch the full animated video above. Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Related Content: Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960) Ayn Rand Adamantly Defends Her Atheism on The Phil Donahue Show (Circa 1979) The Outspoken Ayn Rand Interviewed by Mike Wallace (1959) Ayn Rand Trashes C.S. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an "Abysmal Bastard" An Animated Ayn Rand Dispenses Terrible Love Advice to Mike Wallace (1959) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post An Animated Ayn Rand Dispenses Terrible Love Advice to Mike Wallace (1959) appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsi06PG7w_0 Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining might have left critics scratching their heads when it first came out, but it has since come to be recognized as a horror masterpiece. The film is both stylistically distinctive - those long tracking shots, the one-point perspective, that completely amazing carpeting - and narratively open-ended. Kubrick freights the movie with lots of signifiers without clearly pointing out what they signify: Like why is there Native American imagery throughout the film? Why is Jack Nicholson writing his masterpiece on a German typewriter? And, for that matter, why is he reading a Playgirl magazine while waiting for his job interview? The multivalence of The Shining inspired a whole feature-length documentary about the meaning of the movie called Room 237, where various theorists talk through their interpretations. Is it possible that the movie is both about the horrors of the Holocaust and about the staging of the Apollo 11 moon landing? So perhaps it isn’t surprising that The Shining has been the fodder for filmmakers to impose their own meaning on the flick. A couple recent video pieces have reimagined the movie as shot by two of the reigning auteurs of cinema - Wes Anderson and David Lynch. Wes Anderson is, of course, the filmmaker of such twee, formally exacting works as The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and, most recently, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Filmmaker Steve Ramsden creates a quick and witty mash up of The Overlook Hotel and the Grand Budapest. The video raises all sorts of questions. How, for example, would The Shining have been different with an officious concierge with a pencil mustache? You can see Wes Anderson’s The Shining above. Of the two filmmakers, David Lynch is thematically closer to Kubrick. Both have made violent, controversial movies that plumb the murky depths of the masculine mind. Both have made innovative films that play on multiple levels. And both made movies that completely freaked me out as a teenager. Kubrick was even a big fan of Lynch. In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, Lynch recalls meeting Kubrick, and Kubrick telling the young filmmaker that Eraserhead was his favorite movie. If that doesn’t provide you with a lifetime’s worth of validation, I don’t know what will. Richard Verina crams every single Lynchian quirk into his eight-minute video - from creepy red curtains to dream-like superimpositions to really interesting light fixtures. Sure, the piece might be a minute or two too long but for hardcore fans this piece is a hoot. Verina even manages to work in references to Lynch’s bête noir, Dune. You can see Blue Shining above. Related Content: Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining The Making of The Shining Saul Bass’ Rejected Poster Concepts for The Shining (and His Pretty Excellent Signature) Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkH11ZiIL9E Part of the mission of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is to help people answer the question, "What is that bird?" And so, in collaboration with the Visipedia research project, they’ve designed Merlin, a free app available on iTunes and Google Play. The app asks you a few basic questions — what’s the color, size, and behavior of the bird you saw, and also when and where did you see it — and then, drawing on a database of information gathered by Cornell experts and thousands of bird enthusiasts, the app will give you a shortlist of possibilities. From there you can zero in on the actual bird you saw. The free app (introduced in the video above) launched with "285 species most commonly encountered in North America." But Cornell plans to add more species and features over time. Meanwhile, the current app already offers "more than 2,000 stunning images taken by top photographers," "more than 1,000 audio recordings from the Macaulay Library, identification tips from experts, and range maps from the Birds of North America Online." Happy birdwatching! via Cornell/Petapixel Related Content: Cornell Launches Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Animal Sounds, with Recordings Going Back to 1929 A Bird Ballet in Southern France A Stunning, Chance Encounter With Nature 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. What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cornell Will Give You the Answer is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cornell Will Give You the Answer appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnLVMREVA6M Jim Jarmusch, like his younger compatriots in filmmaking Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, made his name as much with his taste as with his body of work. Or maybe it makes more sense to say that he’s made his name in large part by making films shaped by, and showcasing, that taste. This seems to have held especially true in the case of Only Lovers Left Alive, his most recent feature, which focuses on a married couple of vampire aesthetes who split their time between her place in Tangier stacked with yellowed volumes of poetry, and his decaying Detroit Victorian decked out with a noise-rock recording studio and an iPhone patched through an old tube television. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uHAM-3PJ5k So Jarmusch’s fans will by definition have some familiarity with the director’s preferences in clothing, music, European cultures, and niches of Americana. But what about in other movies? Here we have a top ten list from the maker of Permanent Vacation, Mystery Train, and Night on Earth, originally composed for the British Film Institute’s 2002 Sight and Sound top ten poll. Three of Jarmusch’s selections you can watch online here, or find them in our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. L’Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo) Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu) They Live by Night (1949, Nicholas Ray) Bob le Flambeur (1955, Jean-Pierre Melville) Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau)  The Cameraman (1928, Buster Keaton/Edward Sedgwick)  Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson) Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa) Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)  Rome, Open City (1945, Roberto Rossellini) The true Jarmusch enthusiast will immediately notice a number of connections between his own pictures and those he names as his favorites. He began his career working as an assistant to the director of They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray (and you can even glimpse Jarmusch in Lightning Over Water, Wim Wenders’ documentary on Ray’s final years). Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai shares not just titular but philosophical qualities with Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. With Bob le Flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville gave birth to cinematic "cool," a tradition Jarmusch has done his level best to uphold. And if D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms sounds a bit like Broken Flowers, the similarities — the indirect ones, at least — don’t end there. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1NbA_eO7Es And all cinephiles, Jarmusch fans or otherwise, will notice that he has included not a single color film among his top ten. Some of this might have to do with his generally retro sensibility (something to which even casual viewers of his work can attest), but the likes of Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Dead Man, and Coffee and Cigarettes suggest that he himself counts as one of the finest users of black-and-white cinematography in the modern day. The vivid colors Yorick Le Saux captured for him in Only Lovers Left Alive (and Christopher Doyle did in its predecessor, The Limits of Control), suggest that Jarmusch’s universe exists equally well in both visual realms, but speaking from my own Jarmusch fandom, I do hope he has at least one more black-and-white picture in him. Related Content: Two Short Films on Coffee and Cigarettes from Jim Jarmusch & Paul Thomas Anderson Jim Jarmusch: The Art of the Music in His Films Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talking Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dynamite Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Jim Jarmusch’s 10 Favorite Films: Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Other Black & White Classics is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Jim Jarmusch’s 10 Favorite Films: Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Other Black & White Classics appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_li_d_YviZ4 Sometime in the last decade, as both YouTube and smart phones became our primary means of cultural transmission, the isolated vocal track meme came into being, reaching its summit in the sublime ridiculousness of David Lee Roth’s unadorned "Running With the Devil" vocal tics. His yelps, howls, and "Whoooohoooos!" produced the very best version of that virtual novelty known as the soundboard app, and welcomed many a caller to many a kooky voicemail greeting. The isolated track has since become a phenomenon worthy of study, and we’ve done our share here of poring over various voices and instruments stripped from their song’s context and placed before us in ways we’d never heard before. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbKh0Y_QCrc Perhaps serious analysis too shall be the fate of a goofy visual meme that also thrives on the ridiculousness of pop music’s presentation: the musicless music video. The idea is a similar one, isolating the image instead of the sound: popular videos, already weirdly over the top, become exercises in choreographed awkwardness or voyages into uncanny valleys as we watch their stars pose, preen, and contort themselves in weird costumes for seemingly no reason, accompanied only by the mundane sounds of their shuffling feet and grunts, belches, nervous laughter, etc. Take the particularly funny examples here: Mick Jagger and David Bowie prancing through the bizarre "Dancing in the Streets" video (original here); the members of Queen performing domestic chores in "I Want to Break Free" (original); Elvis Presley squeaking and spasming onstage in a TV take of "Blue Suede Shoes"; Nirvana moping and swaying in that high school gym while a nearby custodian goes about his business….. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jd9AmepgdM Though these skewed re-evaluations of famous moments in pop history make use of a similar premise as the isolated track, the sounds we hear are not—as they sometimes seem—vérité audio recordings from the videos’ sets. They are the creation of Austrian sound designer, editor, and mixer Mario Wienerroither, who, The Daily Dot informs us, "works from a sound library that he’s spent years amassing." The results, as you will hear for yourself, "range from humorous to disturbing and everywhere in between." Musicless music videos remind us of how silly and artificial these kinds of staged, mimed pseudo-performances really are—they only become convincing to us through the magical editing together sound and image on cue and on beat. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUNiUg8_Nwc Wienerroither began his project with the Queen video, inspired when he caught it playing while his TV was on mute. The moment, he says, was "a vital spark." Since then, dozens of musicless music videos, and TV and film clips, have popped up on YouTube (see a sizeable playlist here.) One of the most awkward, The Prodigy’s "Firestarter," helped rocket the phenomenon into major popularity. Imitators have since posted musicless videos of the Friends intro and Miley Cyrus’ "Wrecking Ball." What can we learn from these videos? Nothing, perhaps, we didn’t already know: that pop culture’s most enduring moments are also its most absurd, that nostalgia is a dish best served remixed, that the internet—a powerful force for good as well as ill—is often at its best when it is a powerful force for weird. Though the medium may be frivolous, these are messages worth remembering. Related Content: Listen to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie on the Isolated Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pressure,’ 1981 Kurt Cobain’s Isolated Vocal Track From ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ 1991 Hear Isolated Guitar Tracks From Some of Rock’s Greatest: Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=k52nEiV8TYY Gérard Courant is a French filmmaker, who, at least until 2011, held the distinction of directing the longest film ever made. Clocking in at 192 hours, and shot over 36 years (1978-2006), Cinématon consisted of "a series of over 2,880 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time." Ken Loach, Wim Wenders, Terry Gilliam, Julie Delpy all made appearances. And so too did Jean-Luc Godard. (See below.) //www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf65408Gwbc While making Cinématon, Courant also created another kind of experimental film — what he calls "compressed" films. In 1995, he shot Compression de Alphaville, an accelerated homage to Jean-Luc Godard 1965 sci-fi film, Alphaville. Then came a "compression" (top) of Godard’s À bout de souffle/Breathless (1960), the classic of French New Wave cinema. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eq0VzjxNP4 During the 1960s and 1970s, when Courant came of age as a filmmaker, sculptors like César Baldaccini created art by compressing everyday objects-like Coke cans-into modern sculptures. So Courant took things a step further and figured why not compress art itself. Why not compress a 90 minute film into 3-4 minutes, while keeping the plot of the original film firmly intact. Along the way, Courant asked himself: Do compressed films honor the original? Does one have the right to touch these masterpieces? And can one decompress these compressed films and then return them to their original form? Ponder these questions as you watch the examples above. Note: If you read French, Courant gives more of the backstory on his compressed films here. via Dangerous Minds Related Content: 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) Jefferson Airplane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Captures It (1968) Watch the Rolling Stones Write "Sympathy for the Devil": From Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One 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. The Entirety of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless Artfully Compressed Into a 3 Minute Film is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post The Entirety of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless Artfully Compressed Into a 3 Minute Film appeared first on Open Culture.

In March, we featured 43 original tracks of classical music by philosopher and self-taught composer Friedrich Nietzsche, better known as the author of books like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Despite the enduring importance of his textual output, Josh Jones noted that "what Nietzsche loved most was music." He "found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance." Today we offer more of the eccentric, highly opinionated 19th-century German philosopher’s musical side. In the playlist just above, you can hear his piano compositions as collected on Michael Krücker’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Complete Solo Piano Works. "Most of the works on this album date from the 1860s, when [Nietzsche] was a celebrated young professor and philosopher," writes AllMusic’s James Manheim. "The music is light, often quasi-improvisatory, and some of it resembles the keyboard music of the composer whom Nietzsche extolled later in life, Georges Bizet. The most substantial piece, the 20-minute Hymnus an die Freundschaft, was essentially his last composition, but he later reworked it with texts by his then-love interest, Lou Andreas-Salomé; that version was later arranged for chorus and orchestra by another composer." Manheim also notes that this selection of piano pieces, in their brevity, suggest that "the aphoristic style of Nietzsche’s late writings was anticipated by his musical thinking." Enthusiasts of Nietzsche’s life and career will certainly find themselves making even more connections between his musical and philosophical work than that. But those looking for his motivation to work in this purest of all arts perhaps need look no further than this typically unequivocal pronouncement: "Without music, life would be a mistake." You can find more Nietzschean piano compositions below, these performed by Dorothea Klotz. To hear the music, you will need to download Spotify’s free software, if you haven’t already. Related Content: Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche: 43 Original Tracks 130+ Free Online Philosophy Courses The Philosophy of Nietzsche: An Introduction by Alain de Botton A Free Playlist of Music From The Works Of James Joyce (Plus Songs Inspired by the Modernist Author) The Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.   Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Classical Piano Compositions: They’re Aphoristic Like His Philosophy is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Classical Piano Compositions: They’re Aphoristic Like His Philosophy appeared first on Open Culture.

Art lovers who visit my hometown of Washington, DC have an almost embarrassing wealth of opportunities to view art collections classical, Baroque, Renaissance, modern, postmodern, and otherwise through the Smithsonian’s network of museums. From the East and West Wings of the National Gallery, to the Hirshhorn, with its wondrous sculpture garden, to the American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery—I’ll admit, it can be a little overwhelming, and far too much to take in during a weekend jaunt, especially if you’ve got restless family in tow. (One can’t, after all, miss the Natural History or Air and Space Museums… or, you know… those monuments.) In all the bustle of a DC vacation, however, one collection tends to get overlooked, and it is one of my personal favorites—the Freer and Sackler Galleries, which house the Smithsonian’s unique collection of Asian art, including the James McNeill Whistler-decorated Peacock Room. (See his "Harmony in Blue and Gold" above.) Standing in this re-creation of museum founder Charles Freer’s personal 19th century gallery—which he had relocated from London to his Detroit mansion in 1904—is an aesthetic experience like no other. And like most such experiences, there really is no virtual equivalent. Nonetheless, should you have to hustle past the Freer and Sackler collections on your DC vacation, or should you be unable to visit the nation’s capital at all, you can still get a taste of the beautiful works of art these buildings contain. Like many major museums all over the world—including the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, The British Library, and over 200 others—the Freer/Sackler has made its collection, all of it, available to view online. You can also download much of it. See delicate 16th century Iranian watercolors like "Woman with a spray of flowers" (top), powerful Edo period Japanese ink on paper drawings like "Thunder god" (above), and astonishingly intricate 15th century Tibetan designs like the "Four Mandala Vajravali Thangka" (below). And so, so much more. As Freer/Sackler director Julian Raby describes the initiative, "We strive to promote the love and study of Asian art, and the best way we can do so is to free our unmatched resources for inspiration, appreciation, academic study, and artistic creation." There are, writes the galleries’ website, Bento, "thousands of works now ready for you to download, modify, and share for noncommercial purposes." More than 40,000, to be fairly precise. You can browse the collection to your heart’s content by "object type," topic, name, place, date, or "on view." Or you can conduct targeted searches for specific items. In addition to centuries of art from all over the far and near East, the collection includes a good deal of 19th century American art, like the sketch of Whistler’s mother, below, perhaps a preparatory drawing for his most famous painting. Though I do recommend that you visit these exquisite galleries in person if you can, you must at least take in their collections via this generous online collection and its bounty of international artistic treasures. Get started today. via Kottke Related Content: Download 35,000 Works of Art from the National Gallery, Including Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt & More 40,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Smithsonian Digitizes & Lets You Download 40,000 Works of Asian and American Art is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Smithsonian Digitizes & Lets You Download 40,000 Works of Asian and American Art appeared first on Open Culture.

Tim Hunt won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 2001. He was knighted by the Queen in 2006, making him Sir Tim Hunt. He’s a member of the Royal Society. And he’s apparently a chauvinist too. Speaking to an audience Monday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea, Hunt reportedly made an argument for why men and women should work in separate science labs: "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry." Despite issuing something of a non-apology later, Hunt had to resign from his honorary position at University College London (UCL). The school then issued a statement saying, "U.C.L. was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality." It’s easy to dismiss Hunt as someone who is intelligent in one part of his life, and fodder for jokes in the other. But, as Kate Maltby points out on Twitter, "men like Tim Hunt still run universities, businesses, politics." They give with their accomplishments, and they take away maybe more with their prejudices. via The New York Times 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. Nobel Prize-Winner Tim Hunt Makes Asinine Comments About Women & Science; Loses His University Post is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Nobel Prize-Winner Tim Hunt Makes Asinine Comments About Women & Science; Loses His University Post appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=BefliMlEzZ8 Sir Christopher Lee died on Sunday at the age of 93, bringing to a close a long and distinguished acting career — though one fortunately not confined only to the heights of respectability. Lee could get schlocky with the best of them, elevating otherwise clunky, broad, or overly lurid genre films with his inimitable combination of stature, bearing, and (especially) voice, most notably as Hammer Horror’s go-to Count Dracula in the 1950s and 60s, as a James Bond villain in 1974, and as various sinister gray eminences in more recent Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqs_9QiFQTw But Lee made himself equally at home in projects involving the "better" classes of genre as well. His famous voice did supreme justice to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the 19th-century writer whose work did so much to define modern horror literature. At the top of the post, you can hear Lee give a reading of Poe’s well-known 1845 poem "The Raven"; just below, we have the trailer for Raúl García’s animated adaptation of Poe’s 1839 story "The Fall of the House of Usher," over which Lee intones suitably ominous narration straight from the text. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVzOve8T39w If you’d like to hold your own tribute to the late Sir Lee, you’ll want to listen to all his Poe-related work, watch his performances in such films as the thoroughly cult-classic The Wicker Man and the founder-of-Pakistan biopic Jinnah (in which he played the title role, his personal favorite), and play aloud a selection from his stint as a heavy-metal Christmas vocalist. Most artists who began their careers in the 1940s got publicly categorized as "highbrow" or "lowbrow"; Lee’s career, with its many forays right up to the end into the conventional and unconventional, the straight-ahead and the bizarre, existed in a reality beyond brows — the one, in other words, that we all live in now. Related Content: Christopher Lee Narrates a Beautiful Animation of Tim Burton’s Poem, Nightmare Before Christmas Horror Legend Christopher Lee Presents a Heavy Metal Version of The Little Drummer Boy Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Christopher Lee (R.I.P.) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," and From "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Christopher Lee (R.I.P.) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," and From "The Fall of the House of Usher" appeared first on Open Culture.

Artist: Helen Sanderson If you love something give it away. If it doesn’t come back to you, it was never really yours… Or, it’s a labor of love you created under the auspices of the Brooklyn Art Library, with the full knowledge that giving it away is a cost of participation. Every year, thousands of artists, from the experienced to the fledgling, pay a nominal fee to fill a 5×7 sketchbook with a custom barcode. Upon completion, the books are to be mailed back to the one room Art Library, to become part of the permanent collection, currently over 34,000 volumes strong (17,000 of which appear online). Visitors receive free library cards that allow them to view as many volumes as they like in-house, three at a time. Artists willing to cough up a slightly more substantial fee can have their book digitized for online viewing at The Sketchbook Project. Artist: Tim Oliveira In their virgin state, the sketchbooks are uniform. From there, anything goes, provided they retain their original height and width, and swell to no more than an inch thick. (Messy, gooey books might face rejection, in part because they threaten to contaminate the herd.) Dip in at random and you will find an astonishing array of finished work: messy, meticulous, intimate, inscrutable, self-mocking, sincere, abstract, narrative, carefully plotted, utterly improvisational, accomplished, amateur - rendered in a wide variety of media, including ball point pen and collage. Artist: Estella Yu My favorite way to browse the collection, whether in person or online, is by selecting a theme, just as the artists do when signing up for the annual project. 2016’s themes include  "sandwich," "great hopes and massive failures," and "Ahhh! Monster!" ("I’ll choose my own theme" is a perennial menu offering.) The theme that guided the artists whose work is published herein is "Things Found on Restaurant Napkins." Would you have guessed? Artist: Christopher Moffitt You can also search on specific words or mediums, artists’ names, and geographic locations. To date, The Sketchbook Project has received sketchbooks by creative people from 135+ countries. Those ready to take the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project plunge can enlist here. Don’t fret about your qualifications—co-founders Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker have made things democratic, which is to say uncurated, by design. Artist: Betty Esperanza via The New Yorker Related Content: New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art LA County Museum Makes 20,000 Artistic Images Available for Free Download Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her 2011 sketchbook, "I’m a Scavenger" is housed in the Brooklyn Art Library. Follow her @AyunHalliday The Sketchbook Project Presents Online 17,000 Sketchbooks, Created by Artists from 135 Countries is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post The Sketchbook Project Presents Online 17,000 Sketchbooks, Created by Artists from 135 Countries appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuVax7iMM6Y Has there ever been a more entertaining song containing-as critic Robert Christgau enumerated— "slavery, interracial sex, cunnilingus, and less distinctly, sadomasochism, lost virginity, rape and heroin" as the Rolling Stones’ 1971 "Brown Sugar"? The song’s lyrics lay in wait for those who hear it in passing on classic rock radio, like an un-PC land mine. And you’ll only step on one when you’re dancing. Last week, the Rolling Stones promoted the re-release/remaster/repackage of their 1971 album Sticky Fingers with an alternative take of the song, featuring Eric Clapton on slide guitar, and a sloppier, more festive sound. It’s the first official release of a version long since bootlegged. Unlike many alternative versions found on deluxe editions, this recording came after the classic track was recorded, but the path of Sticky Fingers was a convoluted one. For starters, it was Mick Jagger, not Keith Richards, who came up with the opening riff, something he wrote while in Australia filming Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly as a way of rehabilitating his hand after injuring it. Jagger says he had Freddy Cannon’s rough-around-the-edges 1959 "Tallahassee Lassie" in mind, though you might be hard pressed to hear the influence. The Stones recorded "Brown Sugar" at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama in early December, 1969. It was just a few days after the release of their epochal Let It Bleed, and a week after the New York and Baltimore concerts recorded for Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!. Brian Jones was nearly half a year dead. Guitarist Mick Taylor was new. And Muscle Shoals was not yet a studio of legend. It had been the home of one hit: R.B. Greaves’ humping-the-secretary single "Take a Letter, Maria." Memphis was nearby and had better studios, but the Stones wanted to check out this new place. On the first night, they recorded a cover of "You Gotta Move" by Mississippi Fred McDowell that ends side one of the album. The next day, they recorded "Brown Sugar." Mick Jagger told a reporter upon entering the studio: "I’ve got a new one myself. No words yet, but a few words in my head - called Brown Sugar - about a woman who screws one of her black servants. I started to call it Black Pussy but I decided that was too direct, too nitty-gritty." Jim Dickinson, Muscle Shoals producer and session piano player, is quoted in Keith Richard’s 2010 book Life, "I watched Mick write the lyrics. It took him maybe forty-five minutes; it was disgusting. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing!" Many years later Marsha Hunt, Jagger’s secret girlfriend at the time and mother of his first child Karis, would reveal the song was indeed about her, which makes the taboos of slavery and rape in the lyrics all that more disturbing. The next day, the band focused on another new song called "Wild Horses" and then they were back on the road, premiering "Brown Sugar" at the disastrous concert at the Altamont Speedway where several people died. The band wanted to release the song, but contractual problems with former label ABKCO halted their plans. A year later, while the majority of Sticky Fingers had been recorded, the group celebrated Keith Richards’ birthday at Olympic Studios in London. The alternative version above comes from that party and features Al Kooper on piano and Eric Clapton on slide. Richards preferred this version, but it never made the cut, and listening to it now the official version sounds like the obvious choice: the sound of Muscle Shoals is undeniable. Related Content: Mick Jagger Tells the Story Behind ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Merry Clayton’s Haunting Background Vocals The Rolling Stones Release a Soulful, Never-Heard Acoustic Version of "Wild Horses" Watch the Rolling Stones Write "Sympathy for the Devil": From Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One Gimme Shelter: Watch the Classic Documentary of the Rolling Stones’ Disastrous Concert at Altamont 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.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mLdo4uMJUU Those who know the name Marcel Proust, if not his work itself, know it as that of the most solitary and introspective of writers—a name become an adjective, describing an almost painfully delicate variety of sensory reminiscence verging on tantric solipsism. Proust has earned the reputation for writing what Alain de Botton above tells us in his Proust introduction is "officially the longest novel in the world," A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The book—or books, rather, totaling double the number of words as Tolstoy’s War and Peace—recounts the mainly contemplative travails of a "thinly veiled" version of the author. It is, in one sense, a very long, masterfully stylized diary of the author’s loves, lusts, likes, moods, and tastes of every kind. Those who know the iPhone app, "Proust"—a far fewer number, I’d wager—know it as a game that harnesses the combined power of social networking, instant online opinion, and survey technology in a relentlessly repetitive exercise in faceless collectivity. These two entities are perhaps vaguely related by the Proust questionnaire, but the distance between them is more significant, standing as an ironic emblem of the distance between Proust’s refined literary universe and that of our contemporary mass culture. Proust, a constitutionally fragile elitist born to wealthy Parisian parents in 1871, concluded that a life worth living requires the uniquely sensitive, finely-tuned appreciation of everyday life that children and artists possess, uncolored by the spoils of habit and deadening routine. "Proust" the game—as the host of its viciously satirical video proclaims in an ambiguously European accent—concludes "It’s fun to judge"… in identical, rainbow-colored screens that reduce every consideration to a vapid contest with no stakes or effort. It too represents, through parody, a kind of philosophy of life. And one might broadly say we all live somewhere in-between the hyper-aestheticism of Proust the writer and the mindless rapid-fire swipe-away trivializing of Proust the app. De Botton, consistent with the mission of his very missionary School of Life, would like us to move closer to the literary Proust’s philosophy, a "project of reconciling us to the ordinary circumstances of life" and the "charm of the everyday." As he does with all of the figures he conscripts for his lessons, De Botton presumes that Proust’s primary intent in his interminable work was to "help us" realize this charm—and Proust did in fact say as much. But readers and scholars of the reclusive French writer may find this statement, its author, and his writing, much more complicated and difficult to make sense of than we’re given to believe. Nonetheless, this School of Life video, like many of the others we’ve featured here, does give us a way of approaching Proust that is much less daunting than so many others, complete with clever cut-out animations that illustrate Proust’s theory of memory, occasioned by his famed, fateful encounter with a cup of tea and a madeleine. The teatime epiphany caused Proust to observe: The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful, is that we form our judgment ordinarily not on the evidence of life itself, but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life, and therefore we judge it disparagingly. We may take or leave De Botton’s interpretation of Proust’s work, but it seems more and more imperative that we give the work itself our full attention—or as much of it as we can spare. Related Content: Watch Monty Python’s "Summarize Proust Competition" on the 100th Anniversary of Swann’s Way Marcel Proust Fills Out a Questionnaire in 1890: The Manuscript of the ‘Proust Questionnaire’ What Are Literature, Philosophy & History For? Alain de Botton Explains with Monty Python-Style Videos Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. An Introduction to the Literary Philosophy of Marcel Proust, Presented in a 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. The post An Introduction to the Literary Philosophy of Marcel Proust, Presented in a Monty Python-Style Animation appeared first on Open Culture.

View image | gettyimages.com At 24, some five years before publishing his breakout book, Hell’s Angels, and nearly a decade before branding himself a "gonzo journalist," the young Hunter S. Thompson was an anonymous freelancer looking to make a name for himself. The year was 1962. Fidel Castro had marched into Havana three years earlier, and the story of the decade — the expanding frontier of the Cold War — was playing out in Latin America. It occurred to Thompson that a hungry cub reporter could build a reputation covering it. Thompson’s epiphany coincided with the launch of the National Observer, a mildly experimental weekly newspaper published by the Dow Jones Company. Thompson sent a letter introducing himself, said he was headed to South America, and got an invite to submit any stories he wrote along the way. He arrived in Colombia in May of 1962 and, over the course of the next year, traveled through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The Observer published some 20 of his stories from or about South America, most of which focused on the continent’s culture and politics, and on how these were affected by a Cold War-era U.S. foreign policy centered around aid and containment. Six of Thompson’s South America pieces were anthologized in his 1979 collection The Great Shark Hunt (some in a slightly altered form); the rest have been essentially lost for more than 50 years, readable only in a few libraries’ microform collections of the Observer, which folded in 1977. I dug up the whole series while researching my book, The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (get a copy here). From the outset, I intended to post the articles online somewhere following the book’s publication, so that other readers and researchers can easily access them — and now that the book’s been on shelves for a year, it seemed like time to make good. As I write in the book — and as I’ve described in The Atlantic and elsewhere — Thompson’s South American reportage offers a glimpse at his emerging style. This is sharp, witty participatory journalism with a keen eye for the absurdities of South American life in the 1960s . The pieces are a mix of straightforward news reporting and more narrative, feature-style articles. The depth of insight into Cold War foreign policy is impressive, and the stories contain some memorable prose: the taxis in Quito, Ecuador, "rolled back and forth like animals looking for meat." Asuncion, Paraguay, is "an O. Henry kind of place . . . about as lively as Atlantis, and nearly as isolated." La Paz, Bolivia, meanwhile, offers "steep hills and high prices, sunny days and cold nights, demonstrations by wild-eyed opposition groups, drunken Indians reeling and shouting through the streets at night — a manic atmosphere." The Community Texts collection at archive.org now hosts a document with 18 of Thompson’s National Observer stories from South America, as well as hosting each piece for individual reading or download. Find them all right below. Note: If you find that the font is small, just click the plus (+) sign at the bottom of the screen to increase the font size. 1) ‘Leery Optimism’ at Home for Kennedy Visitor (June 24, 1962) A profile of Colombia’s U.S.-friendly president-elect. 2) Nobody is Neutral Under Aruba’s Hot Sun (July 16, 1962) On the divisive politics of sunny Aruba. 3) A Footloose American in a Smuggler’s Den (August 6, 1962) Thompson is marooned in Guajira, Colombia, smuggling capital of the Caribbean. 4) Democracy Dies in Peru, But Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing (August 27, 1962) On the results of a surprising Peruvian election — and the military takeover that followed. 5) How Democracy is Nudged Ahead in Ecuador (September 17, 1962) A day in the life of the American propaganda bureau in Ecuador. 6) Ballots in Brazil Will Measure the Allure of Leftist Nationalism (October 1, 1962) On a pivotal Brazilian election and the lure of the populist left. 7) Operation Triangular: Bolivia’s Fate Rides With It (October 15, 1962) On tin miners’ graveyards, violent strikers, and Bolivia’s crippling reliance on resource extraction. 8) Uruguay Goes to the Polls with Economy Sagging (November 19, 1962)  The Blancos and Colorados clash at the polls in South America’s most developed democracy. 9) Chatty Letters During a Journey From Aruba to Rio (December 31, 1962) A selection of Thompson’s (sometimes desperate) letters from South America to his editor. 10) Troubled Brazil Holds Key Vote (January 7, 1963) - Text 1 - Text 2 Brazilians vote with the specter of revolution on the horizon. 11) It’s a Dictatorship, But Few Seem to Care Enough to Stay and Fight (January 28, 1963) Reporting on the beleaguered opposition to Paraguay’s dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. 12) Brazilian Soldiers Stage Raid in Revenge (February 11, 1963) Reporting on a grudge, a rogue military, and a murder in a Rio de Janeiro bar. 13) Leftist Trend and Empty Treasury Plague the Latin American Giant (March 11, 1963) Hyperinflation, labor strikes, and growing instability in Brazil. 14) A Never-Never Land High Above the Sea (April 15, 1963) On madness, paranoia, and bizarre happenings in the streets of La Paz. 15) Election Watched as Barometer Of Country’s Economic Trend (May 20, 1963)  Reporting on the military junta from gloomy Lima. 16) He Haunts the Ruins of His Once-Great Empire (June 10, 1963) On the plight — and latent political power — of indigenous Andeans. 17) Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border (August 19, 1963) On cynicism and disillusionment (and drinking) among American expats in South America. 18) Can Brazil Hold Out Until the Next Election? (October 28, 1963) Hyper-inflation threatens to sink the Brazilian government. This is a guest post from Brian Kevin, a writer based in Maine and the author of The Footloose American. Follow him on Twitter at @BrianMT. Related Content: Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life Read 10 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965-2005) Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3U30wSAV4Q Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific creators in science-fiction history, wrote or edited more than 500 books in his lifetime, including the high-profile ones we all recognize like I, Robot and the Foundation series (hear a version dramatized here). But which piece of this massive body of work did Asimov himself consider his favorite? Always a fan of clarity, the man didn’t leave that issue shrouded in mystery: the honor belongs to "The Last Question," which first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. It’s now available in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1. "Why is it my favorite?" Asimov later wrote. "For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn’t have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer." But it also had, and continues to have, "the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they ‘think’ I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question.'" //www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqjSP7kOO4 You certainly won’t forget who wrote the story if you listen to it in Asimov’s own voice in the video at the top of the post. Alternatively, you can hear it read by Leonard Nimoy, surely the most distinctive sci-fi narrator of our time, in the video just above. Nimoy first read "The Last Question" aloud for an adaptation staged at Michigan State University’s Abrams Planetarium in 1966, a production that first moved Asimov himself to consider ranking its source material among his best works. Of course, the story would have received none of this retrospective attention, from its author or others, if not for its intellectual content, which comes through vividly no matter how you take it in. Look past the more entertainingly dated elements — expressions like "for Pete’s sake," enormous central computers that print all their output on paper slips, an early reference to "highballs" — and you find plenty of elements that qualify as eternal: the ever more rapid expansion of humanity, the ever more rapid progress of technology, and the seemingly ever-faltering ability of the former to maintain dominance over the latter. Within the story’s nine pages, Asimov even digs into scientific concepts like entropy and the heat death of the universe as well as philosophical concepts like the true nature of "forever" and the origin of life, the universe, and everything. If you read only one of Asimov’s stories, he’d surely approve if you made it "The Last Question." (And if you read two, why not "The Last Answer"?). Find these readings added to our collection, 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Related Content: 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 Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Bradbury Stories From The Martian Chronicles & The Illustrated Man (1975-76) Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story "The Last Question" Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story "The Last Question" Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtNtYvfXPwA Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) might be over three hours long but you never feel bored. The action scenes never fail to thrill and the characters are so well developed that you genuinely grieve when they die. The epic is so brilliantly realized that it’s no surprise that filmmakers everywhere took note. In The Magnificent Seven (1960), a direct remake of Seven Samurai, Hollywood swapped out katanas for six-shooters and recast the movie as a Western. Other films from The Guns of Navarro to the Bollywood blockbuster Sholay to even Pixar’s A Bug’s Life have drawn heavily from Kurosawa’s masterpiece. Add to this list Toshifumi Takizawa’s 26-episode animated TV series Samurai 7. The set up is identical to the original — masterless samurais are hired to protect a village from a ruthless gang of bandits — and many of the characters in the animated series have the same names as characters in the original film. But the total running time of the TV show is three times longer than that of Kurosawa’s film, so Takizawa took a few liberties. The show’s opening scene, for instance, features a massive interstellar battle involving lasers and spaceships. There’s a rusting, elephantine megalopolis straight out of Blade Runner. And also there are robots. The bandits, as it turns out, are more metallic than human, and Kikuchiyo, who was played brilliantly as a drunken wild man by Toshiro Mifune, is in this iteration a grumpy, poorly-constructed cyborg who wields a chainsaw-like sword. The series even has Kirara, a cow-eyed teenaged priestess who sports a midriff-baring kimono. Either the story elements above sound completely preposterous or totally awesome. If you’re in the former category, you can watch the trailer for Kurosawa’s film below. If you’re in the latter category - and the show is a lot of fun - then you can watch episode 1 above, and catch the rest on Youtube. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwvpUtc1hBU Related Content: Akira Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies How Akira Kurosawa Used Movement to Tell His Stories: A Video Essay Akira Kurosawa & Francis Ford Coppola Star in Japanese Whisky Commercials (1980) Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeBPNQ4M-xM I recently talked with a friend who’s planning to schedule a screening of Blade Runner at her film festival. We discussed the important decision that anyone who wants to show Ridley Scott’s Philip K. Dick-adapting masterpiece faces: which Blade Runner? Seven different official cuts exist: many would instinctively choose the 2007 "final cut," some might prefer the 1992 "director’s cut," and a curious minority might even like to see the cut originally released in U.S. theaters in 1982, featuring the Harrison Ford voiceover and happy ending that fans now consider ruinous. But now we have yet another cut of Blade Runner, perhaps the most unusual of them all: a "new" version made out of shots that, even if you’ve seen every official cut of the film, you may never have seen before. "Some enterprising souls have compiled a B-roll cut of the film, using all of the excised footage that was not incorporated in the previous cuts," writes Nerdist’s Joseph McCabe. "There’s so much here that most Blade Runner fans have not seen before that it’s absolutely required viewing. I found it worth watching all forty-five minutes just to hear Edward James Olmos’ gruff Gaff hilariously exclaim, ‘I spit on metaphysics!'" Not to mention all the new views of the picture’s still-striking production design. That running time, over an hour shorter than every other cut, effectively condenses Blade Runner into a short film. It doesn’t play quite like any of the widely seen versions of the film, even though it retains the hated narration and incongruous Hollywood ending of the American theatrical cut. But the elements that feel clunky, over-explanatory, and audience-distrusting in a two-hour Blade Runner somehow work better in this briefer rendition. (Certainly Ford’s voiceover, awkward though it always sounds, helps this trimmed-down story cohere.) You haven’t really seen Blade Runner, so many who love the movie feel, until you’ve seen every Blade Runner — but even now, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them. via Nerdist Related Content: The Art of Making Blade Runner: See the Original Sketchbook, Storyboards, On-Set Polaroids & More The Blade Runner Promotional Film Blade Runner: The Pillar of Sci-Fi Cinema that Siskel, Ebert, and Studio Execs Originally Hated The Blade Runner Sketchbook: The Original Art of Syd Mead and Ridley Scott Online Philip K. Dick Previews Blade Runner: "The Impact of the Film is Going to be Overwhelming" (1981) Watch an Animated Version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner Made of 12,597 Watercolor Paintings The City in Cinema Mini-Documentaries Reveal the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, Her, Drive, Repo Man, and More Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Blade Runner Recut with the Sci-Fi Masterpiece’s Unused Original Footage is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Blade Runner Recut with the Sci-Fi Masterpiece’s Unused Original Footage appeared first on Open Culture.

Two years ago, in a post on the pioneering composer of the original Doctor Who theme, we wrote that "the early era of experimental electronic music belonged to Delia Derbyshire." Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCartney a version of "Yesterday" with an electronic backing in place of strings—helped invent the early electronic music of the sixties through her work with the Radiophonic Workshop, the sound effects laboratory of the BBC. She went on to form one of the most influential, if largely obscure, electronic acts of the decade, White Noise. And yet, calling the early eras of the electronic music hers is an exaggeration. Of course her many collaborators deserve mention, as well as musicians like Bruce Haack, Pierre Henry, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and so many others. But what gets almost completely left out of many histories of electronic music, as with so many other histories, is the prominent role so many women besides Derbyshire played in the development of the sounds we now hear all around us all the time. In recognition of this fact, musician, DJ, and "escaped housewife/schoolteacher" Barbara Golden devoted two episodes of her KPFA radio program "Crack o’ Dawn" to women in electronic music, once in 2010 and again in 2013. She shares each broadcast with co-host Jon Leidecker ("Wobbly"), and in each segment, the two banter in casual radio show style, offering history and context for each musician and composer. Recently highlighted on Ubu’s Twitter stream, the first show, "Women in Electronic Music 1938-1982 Part 1" (above) gives Derbyshire her due, with three tracks from her, including the Doctor Who theme. It also includes music from twenty one other composers, beginning with Clara Rockmore, a refiner and popularizer of the theremin, that weird instrument heard in the Doctor Who intro, designed to simulate a high, tremulous human voice. Also featured is Wendy Carlos’s "Timesteps," an original piece from her A Clockwork Orange score. (You’ll remember her enthralling synthesizer recreations of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony from the film). The second show, above, fills in several gaps in the original broadcast and "could easily be six hours" says co-host Leidecker, given the sheer amount of electronic music out there composed and recorded by women over the past seventy years. This show includes one of our host Golden’s own compositions, "Melody Sumner Carnahan," as well as music from Laurie Anderson and musique concrete composer Doris Hays. These two broadcasts alone cover an enormous range of stylistic and technological ground, but for even more discographical history of women in electronic music, see the playlist below, compiled by "Nerdgirl" Antye Greie-Ripatti for Women’s Day, 2014. Commissioned by Club Transmediale Berlin, the mix includes such well-known names as Yoko Ono, Bjork, and M.I.A., as well as foremothers Derbyshire and Carlos, and dozens more. In lieu of the radio-show chatter of Golden and Leidecker, we have Greie-Ripatti’s post detailing each artist’s time period, country of origin, and contributions to electronic music history. Many of the composers represented here worked for major radio and film studios, scored feature films (like 1956’s Forbidden Planet), invented and innovated new instruments and techniques, wrote for orchestras, and passed on their knowledge as educators and producers. Greie-Ripatti’s page quotes a Danish electronic producer and performer saying "there is a lot of women in electronic music… invisible women." Thanks to efforts like hers and Golden’s, these pioneering creators need no longer go unseen or, more importantly, unheard. via Ubuweb Related Content: Meet the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ "Yesterday" Into Early Electronica Mr. Rogers Introduces Kids to Experimental Electronic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson (1968) Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Kids Show (1989) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeZrRENgXmY Last Friday, after we marked the passing of Christopher Lee by featuring his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 narrative poem "The Raven," we stumbled, by chance, upon Lee’s reading of another Poe classic-"The Tell-Tale Heart." Operating with the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Edgar Allan Poe, and certainly no such thing as too much Christopher Lee reading Edgar Allan Poe, we’ve featured that second reading above. It’ll be added to our collection of 630 Free Audio Books… via the Edgar Allan Poe Facebook Page 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.

Click to view in a big, high-res format Last week we highlighted for you a beautiful Tree of Languages infographic, created by Minna Sundberg using data from ethnologue.com. This week, we present another visualization of world languages, this one produced by Alberto Lucas Lopéz, on behalf of the South China Morning Post. And, once again, the underlying data comes from ethnologue.com, a research project that catalogues all of the world’s known living languages. Today’s graphic — click here to view it in a large format — takes the world’s 23 most popular languages, and then gives you a visual sense of how many people actually speak those languages overall, and where geographically those languages are spoken. The more a language is spoken, the more space it gets in the visual. When you view the original graphic, you’ll note that Chinese speakers outnumber English speakers by a factor of four. And yet English is spoken in 110 countries, as compared to 33 for Chinese. And the number of people learning English worldwide dwarfs the number learning Mandarin. As you look through Lopéz’s visual, you’ll want to keep one thing in mind: Although the 23 languages visualized above are collectively spoken by 4.1 billion people, there are at least another 6700 known languages alive in the world today. Someone has to cook up a proportional visualization of those. Any takers? Speaking of learning popular languages, don’t miss our collection: Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More. via Mental Floss Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Related Content: The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes Noam Chomsky Talks About How Kids Acquire Language & Ideas in an Animated Video by Michel Gondry A Proportional Visualization of the World’s Most Popular Languages is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post A Proportional Visualization of the World’s Most Popular Languages appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dxRdPLw3Es Many of us in the West live in some of the most fragmented religious landscapes in the world, but in the midst of deepening levels of conflict over policies of birth and death, these two issues that divide us also join us together. More than at any time in history, people live in expectation of similar spans of life; we all lament the loss of loved ones who die at any age; and most of us live with some fear of death, or at least violent, untimely death like the kind Alan Watts describes above. Watts, English Zen guru of sorts (though he would not like the label) lectured more on death than perhaps any other philosophical or religious teacher since the Buddha, but he did so in a way that illuminates our ideas about the inevitable end, even if it should come upon us all of the sudden. You heard a bomb coming at you, you could hear it whistle and you knew it was right above you and heading straight at you, and that you were finished.  This is no abstract thought experiment, of course, but the historical experience of millions of people, from Dresden to Iraq. But despite the terrifying example, Watts describes achieving in that moment absolute clarity and universality. The dreaded bomb whistles toward you, "and you accepted it," he says. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK1BJkBJdtY How exactly does one achieve that acceptance? Without dogmatizing or mysticism, Watts offers some wisdom in another excerpt from a lecture above. This video’s use of melodramatic film clips and cinematic music may be a little schmaltzy, but his matter of fact talk isn’t lessened by it. Though not everyone passes on their genes to a next generation, an example he discusses in both excerpts, we do all leave the planet to make room for new people, wherever they come from, and this, he says, "is an honorable thing…. It’s a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals than it is through the same individual." //www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0mdOvNEUiA Watts was not at all doctrinaire about death, particularly in his later years. In a conversation with Aldous Huxley’s wife Laura in 1968, he called dying "an art," though not quite like Sylvia Plath did: "It is also," he said, "an adventure." He considered Aldous Huxley’s unorthodox death—on an LSD trip while Laura read to him from the Tibetan Bardo Thodol—a "highly intelligent form of dying." Nonetheless, Watts, an Episcopal priest become an explainer of Zen Buddhism in America, also had a great deal to say about more formal religious ideas of death. In the lecture above, from a 1959 American television program, Watts explains a particular Buddhist concept of reincarnation and rebirth through various realms. It’s a picture as fantastic and picturesque as Dante’s, and like his creative act, one that can be read with some literal and much profoundly philosophical significance. These conceptions help demonstrate that far from fearful, our puzzling over the inevitability and mystery of death can be, as it was for Watts, "one of the most creative thoughts I ever thought in my life." Related Content: Zen Master Alan Watts Discovers the Secrets of Aldous Huxley and His Art of Dying The Wisdom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Provoking Animations The Zen Teachings of Alan Watts: A Free Audio Archive of His Enlightening Lectures  Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adventure and Creative Act is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adventure and Creative Act appeared first on Open Culture.