Google has used its Street View technology to let you take virtual tours of some far-flung places — places like Shackleton’s Antarctic, Mt. Everest and other high mountain peaks, The Amazon River, and The Grand Canyon. Now you can add to the list, El Capitan, the iconic rock wall in the middle of Yosemite National Park. Yesterday, Google’s official blog declared, "Today we’re launching our first-ever vertical Street View collection, giving you the opportunity to climb 3,000 feet up the world’s most famous rock wall: Yosemite’s El Capitan. To bring you this new imagery, we partnered with legendary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell." Above, you can see this trio in action, talking about what makes El Cap a mecca for rock climbers everywhere. To create this Street View of El Capitan, Hill, Honnold and Caldwell worked with Google engineers to figure out how to haul a camera up this sheer rock face. And what you ultimately get are some amazing 360-degree panoramic images. According to Caldwell, these "are the closest thing I’ve ever witnessed to actually being thousands of feet up a vertical rock face—better than any video or photo." Which, hating heights, is good enough for me. via Google Blog 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. Climb Virtually Up "El Capitan," Yosemite’s Iconic Rock Wall, With Google Street View 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 Climb Virtually Up "El Capitan," Yosemite’s Iconic Rock Wall, With Google Street View appeared first on Open Culture.

I regularly meet up with speaking partners who help me learn their languages in exchange for my helping them learn English. Even though they usually speak much better English already than I speak Korean, Spanish, Japanese, or what have you, I often feel like I’ve got the heavier end of the job. Why? Because the English language, for all its advantages — its global reach, the ease with which it incorporates foreign terms and neologisms, its wealth of descriptive possibility — has the major disadvantage of seldom making immediate sense. From English’s great flexibility flows great frustration: how many times have foreign friends put up a piece of text to me — often from respected, canonical works of English literature — and demanded an explanation? They’ve usually stumbled over some obscure usage that qualifies as at least unorthodox and perhaps downright ungrammatical, but nonetheless intuitively understandable — if only to a native speaker like me. Here we have one example of just such a linguistic invention refined by no less a respected, canonical writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald: the verb "to cocktail." "As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once," wrote the author of The Great Gatsby in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Who better to first lay out its full conjugation than the man who, as the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center puts it, "gave the Jazz Age its name"? Given that his fame "was for many years based less on his work than his personality—the society playboy, the speakeasy alcoholic whose career had ended in ‘crack-up,’ the brilliant young writer whose early literary success seemed to make his life something of a romantic idyll," he found himself well placed to offer the language a new "taste of Roaring Twenties excess." And so Fitzgerald breaks it down: Present: I cocktail, thou cocktail, we cocktail, you cocktail, they cocktail. Imperfect: I was cocktailing. Perfect or past definite: I cocktailed. Past perfect: I have cocktailed. Conditional: I might have cocktailed. Pluperfect: I had cocktailed. Subjunctive: I would have cocktailed. Voluntary subjunctive: I should have cocktailed. Preterit: I did cocktail. If you, too, decide to teach this advanced verb to your English-learning friends, why not supplement the lesson with the audio clip just above, a reading of the letter from the Ransom Center? Language-learning, no matter the language, inevitably gets to be a grind from time to time, but varying the types of instructional media can help alleviate the inevitable headaches. And when the day’s studies end, of course, an actual cocktailing session couldn’t hurt. After all, they always say you speak a foreign language better after a drink or two. via the great Lists of Note book Related Content: Drinking with William Faulkner: The Writer Had a Taste for The Mint Julep & Hot Toddy Filmmaker Luis Buñuel Shows How to Make the Perfect Dry Martini F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 13 Preposterous Ideas for Your Leftover Turkey 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. F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates "to Cocktail," the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928) 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 F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates "to Cocktail," the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928) appeared first on Open Culture.

Despite the Soviet Union’s suppression of a great many writers and filmmakers, the communist state nonetheless produced some of the finest film and literature of the 20th century. We are lucky, for example, to have Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which was never published during the author’s lifetime and was for many years thereafter censored or relegated to samizdat versions. A similar fate almost befell the first Russian science fiction film, Aelita: Queen of Mars, a silent from 1924 that inspired such indispensable classics as Flash Gordon and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The film—which tops a Guardian list of "Seven Soviet sci-fi films everyone should see"—contributed to a rich cinematic vocabulary without which it would be hard to imagine the aesthetics of much science fiction in general. Directed by Yakov Protazanov in the theatrical, futuristic constructivist style that Fritz Lang borrowed, Aelita tells the story of Los, an Earth engineer who builds a spaceship and travels to Mars to meet and fall in love with its queen. Further plot developments make clear that Lang may owe something to the film’s story as well, involving a tyrannical Martian ruler, Aelita’s father, who ruthlessly exploits his planet’s proletariat. Allmovie describes Aelita as "the Marxist struggle reaches outer space" and indeed the film dramatizes an alien revolution very close to the one that took place back on Earth. Part of the reason the film fell out of favor with the Soviet government in later decades—and irked critics at the time—is its ambivalence about revolutionary politics through its portrayal of Los as a disaffected intellectual. Alexei Tolstoy—author of the film’s source novel—had fewer reservations. The so-called "Comrade Count" won three Stalin prizes after his return from a brief European exile. Unlike the dissident critic Bulgakov, Tolstoy—a distant relative of both Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev—has been described by his enemies as cynical, opportunistic and, later, totally in thrall to Stalin. His friends probably described him as a loyal party man. (He is also credited with being the first to ascertain the Nazi’s use of gas vans.) Aelita the film made a favorable impression on its first audiences (see an original poster above). One of the first full-length films about space travel, it enabled ordinary Russians to imagine what may have seemed to them like the near future of Soviet technology. And yet, writes Andrew Horton in a lengthy essay on Aelita, despite its reputation, the sci-fi classic is "neither science fiction nor a pro-revolutionary film." Contemporary critics and filmmakers felt that Protazanov’s adaptation not only showed insufficient commitment to the revolution, but it also manifested "alleged continuity with the bourgeois cinema of the Tsarist age"—a serious charge in the age of socialist realism and disruptive cinematic experiments like those of Dziga Vertov. In hindsight, however, Aelita turns out to have been a film before its time, and indeed a work of classic sci-fi, in its extremely imaginative use of technology, costuming, and set design. Without the fascination it has always held for film buffs, it might have disappeared, given its opposition to Party dogma: "The film praises domesticity and married life at a time when society was experimenting with the nature and meaning of relationships," Horton writes, "It is a film that looks to rebuilding, consolidation, progress and the future and rejects revolution as an unachievable Utopian ideal open to hijack." All of this context can seem a bit heavy, but we needn’t work too hard to untangle Aelita‘s ideological strands. Simply enjoy the movie as an entertaining technical achievement from which we can draw a line to later sci-fi films like 1957’s Road to the Stars (above) and, from there, to modern masterpieces like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Aelita will be added to our list of 101 Silent Films, a subset of our larger collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via Ubuweb Related Content: Metropolis: Watch a Restored Version of Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece (1927) Eight Free Films by Dziga Vertov, Creator of Soviet Avant-Garde Documentaries Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Comes Soft Rain’ Soviet Artists Envision a Communist Utopia in Outer Space Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch the First Russian Science Fiction Film, Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Watch the First Russian Science Fiction Film, Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) appeared first on Open Culture.

In high school when I was trying to write surrealistic short stories in the vein of Richard Brautigan, despite not really understanding 90 percent of Richard Brautigan, my English teacher recommended I start reading Kurt Vonnegut, so later that day I went down to our city’s sci-fi book/comic book store and bought on her recommendation Breakfast of Champions. A comic novel, it was breezy and fun, and by gum, had cartoons in it! (One was of a cat’s butthole, the effect of which on a high schooler’s mind cannot be overstated.) But, I admit, I haven’t read it since-the world and my tsundoku is too big for rereadings-and maybe you haven’t read it at all, or perhaps it’s your favorite book. It was the novel Vonnegut published four years after his best known work Slaughterhouse Five. When he graded his novels in his 1981 "Autobiographical Collage" Palm Sunday he gave Breakfast a C. It’s certainly one of his most rambling novels, where he brings back Slaughterhouse Five’s sci-fi author Kilgore Trout and pairs him with the delusional Dwayne Hoover, and unpacks all the dark parts of American history, from racism to capitalism to environmental degradation in passages both sober and bleakly comic. John Malkovich doesn’t seem like the obvious choice to read Vonnegut for this audiobook, a short excerpt of which can be heard above. (Note: you can download the complete Malkovich reading for free via Audible’s Free Trial program.) But the passage is key in that it introduces the martini cocktail lounge origins of the book’s title, and Malkovich brings out the droll irony of Vonnegut’s writing, especially the way he rolls the word "schizophrenia" off his tongue. There’s a bit of the schizoid in every author, letting a world of characters speak through them like a medium. For comparison, check out this earlier Open Culture post about Vonnegut reading a long section from Breakfast of Champions in 1970. The author chuckles at some of his more comic passages, and the audience roars along. The timing is that of a standup routine, but this opening—one assumes its the opening—would go on to be furiously rewritten, dropping the first person style. It’s an alternative universe Breakfast that can only leave one to wonder how the rest of the novel might have been handled. h/t Ayun Related content: Richard Brautigan’s Story, ‘One Afternoon in 1939,’ Read From a Wooden Spool Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story 22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Vonnegut Writes Home from World War II: "I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It" 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. Hear John Malkovich Read From Breakfast of Champions, Then Hear Kurt Vonnegut Do the Same 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 John Malkovich Read From Breakfast of Champions, Then Hear Kurt Vonnegut Do the Same appeared first on Open Culture.

Image by Zigurds Zakis They say that Mussolini’s brand of fascism made Italy’s trains run on time. Meanwhile, it looks like Communists and Post-Communist autocrats made the morning subway ride in Russia something of a cultural experience. As you can see below, the Soviets designed the Moscow subway stations as underground palaces, adorned with "high ceilings, stained glass, mosaics and chandeliers." (Check out a gallery of photos here.) In more recent times, city planners opened the Dostoyevskaya subway station, a more austere station where you can see black and white mosaics of scenes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Somewhat controversially, the mosaics depict fairly violent scenes. On one wall, The Independent writes, "Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment brandishes an axe over the elderly pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister, his murder victims in the novel. Near by, a character from Demons holds a pistol to his temple." Nothing like confronting murder and suicide on the morning commute. If these gloomy scenes don’t sound familiar, don’t fret. Late last year, the Moscow subway system launched a pilot where Moscow subway commuters, carrying smartphones and tablets, can download over 100 classic Russian works, for free. As they shuttle from one station to another, riding on subway cars equipped with free wifi, straphangers can read texts by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Lermontov, Gogol and more. Perhaps that takes the sting out of the soaring inflation. Note: You can find countless Russian classics in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections. They were assembled in a liberal, democratic spirit. Related Content: The Digital Dostoevsky: Download Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russian Novelist’s Major Works The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Volumes for Free (in Russian) Stephen Fry Profiles Six Russian Writers in the New Documentary Russia’s Open Book Commuters Can Download Free eBooks of Russian Classics While Riding the Moscow Metro 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 Commuters Can Download Free eBooks of Russian Classics While Riding the Moscow Metro appeared first on Open Culture.

On Monday, we brought you evidence that Stanley Kubrick invented the tablet computer in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, we go back forty years further into cinematic history to ask whether Fritz Lang invented the video phone in 1927’s Metropolis. In the clip above, you can watch a scene set in the home of Joh Fredersen, stern master of the vast, futuristic, titular industrial city of 2026. In order to best rule all he surveys — and to complete the image of a 20th-century dystopia — he lives high above the infernal roil of Metropolis, safely ensconced in one of its vertiginous towers and equipped with the latest hulking, wall-mounted, inexplicably paper-spouting video phone technology. Fredersen, writes Joe Malia in his notes on video phones in film, "appears to use four separate dials to arrive at the correct frequency for the call. Two assign the correct call location and two smaller ones provide fine video tuning. He then picks up a phone receiver with one hand and uses the other to tap a rhythm on a panel that is relayed to the other phone and displayed as flashes of light to attract attention." Not content to infer the mechanics of these imaginary devices, Malia would go on to create the supercut below, a survey of video phones throughout the history of film and television, from Metropolis onward, including a stop at 2001: The supercut also includes a clip from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, whose (on the whole, astonishingly timeless) design I called out for using video phones in a video essay of my own. In reality, contrary to all these 20th-century visions of the far-flung future, video phone technology didn’t develop quite as rapidly as predicted, and when it did develop, it didn’t spread in quite the same way as predicted. Even the rich world of 2015 lacks bulky video phone boxes in every home and on every street corner, but with voice over internet protocol services like Skype, many in even the poorest parts of the world can effectively make better video phone calls than these grand-scale sci-fi productions dared imagine — then again, they do often make them on tablets more or less straight out of 2001. H/T David Crowley Related Content: Metropolis: Watch a Restored Version of Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece (1927) Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey? 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. Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metropolis (1927) 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 Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metropolis (1927) appeared first on Open Culture.

There is a certain kind of thinking that the Buddha called "monkey mind," a state in which our nervous habits become compulsions, hauling us around this way and that, forcing us to jump and shriek at every sound. It was exactly this neurotic state of mind that Leonard Cohen sought to quell when in 1994 he joined Mt. Baldy Zen Center in Los Angeles and became a monk: "I was interested in surrendering to that kind of routine," Cohen told The Guardian in 2001, "If you surrender to the schedule, and get used to its demands, it is a great luxury not to have to think about what you are doing next." There at Mt. Baldy the journalist and cosmopolitan raconteur Pico Iyer met Cohen, unaware at first that it was even him. In his short Baccalaureate speech above to the 2015 graduating class of the University of Southern California, Iyer describes the meeting: After showing him fond hospitality and settling him into the community, Iyer says, Cohen told him that "just sitting still, being unplugged, looking after his friends was… the real deep entertainment that the world had to offer." At the time, Iyer was disappointed. He had admired Cohen for exactly the opposite qualities—for traveling the world, being plugged into the culture, and living a rock star life of self-indulgence. It was this outward manifestation of Cohen that Iyer found alluring, but the poet and songwriter’s inward life, what Iyer calls the "invisible ledger on which we tabulate our lives," was given to something else, something that eventually brought Cohen out of a lifelong depression. Iyer’s thesis, drawn from his encounter with Leonard Cohen, Zen monk, is that "it is really on the mind that our happiness depends." Iyer refers not to that perpetually wheeling monkey mind but what Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi called "beginner’s mind" or "big mind." In such a meditatively absorbed state, we forget ourselves, "which to me," Iyer says, "is almost the definition of happiness." Cohen said as much of his own personal enlightenment: "When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you." After his time at Mt. Baldy, he says, "there was just a certain sweetness to daily life that began asserting itself." Iyer’s short speech, filled with example after example, gives us and his newly graduating audience several ways to think about how we might find that sense of repose—in the midst of busy, demanding lives—through little more than "just sitting still, being unplugged" and looking after each other. Note: You can watch a European documentary on Cohen’s stint as a buddhist monk here. via BoingBoing Related Content: Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musician Featured in a 1965 Documentary Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poetry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musician Began) Leonard Cohen Narrates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Featuring the Dalai Lama (1994) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened 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. The post How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life appeared first on Open Culture.

Four score and seven years ago… It goes on from there. If you’re a bit rusty on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, listen to singer Johnny Cash recite the famously brief speech in its entirety, above, from his America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song album. (The acoustic guitar accompaniment is by long time Cash collaborator, Norman Blake.) A little background for those in need of a refresher: Lincoln delivered the speech in November 1863, at the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Four months earlier, roughly 10,000 Confederate and Union soldiers perished—and another 30,000 were wounded—during three days of fighting in the area. The Battle of Gettysburg ended in a major victory for the North, though Lincoln was frustrated that General George Meade failed to pursue Robert E. Lee’s retreating forces. (Whether or not such a move could have shortened the war is a matter of some debate.) Lincoln welcomed the invitation to the cemetery’s dedication as a chance to frame the significance of the war in terms of the Declaration of Independence. Slave owners frequently cited the constitutionality of their actions, for unlike the Declaration, the Constitution did not hold that all men were created equal. The day’s other speaker, former Harvard President and Secretary of State Edward Everett, praised  the "eloquent simplicity & appropriateness" of the president’s two minute speech, perhaps blushing a bit, given that he himself had held the podium for two hours. A year and a half later, when Lincoln was assassinated, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts summed it up: That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg…and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature he said "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here." He was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it. (How sorry those gentleman would be to learn just how little most Americans today know of the  the Battle of Gettysburg. Fear not, though. A restored version of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary is coming to PBS this fall.) Please note that Lincoln’s brief remarks were carefully prepared, and not scribbled on the back of an envelope during the train ride that took him to Gettysburg. As a nation, we love folksy origin stories, and depending on the size of one’s penmanship, it is indeed possible to fit 272 words on an envelope, but it’s a myth… no matter what Johnny Cash may say in his introduction. PS - If you would like to commit the Gettysburg Address to memory, try singing it to the tune of "I’m Yours" by Jason Mraz. No doubt Professor Lynda Barry would approve.… Related Content: The Poetry of Abraham Lincoln Resurrecting the Sounds of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s New Biopic Animated Video: Johnny Cash Explains Why Music Became a Religious Calling Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday Hear Johnny Cash Deliver Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address 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 Johnny Cash Deliver Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address appeared first on Open Culture.

It was quite a week for President Obama. On Monday, we all got to hear the revealing interview Obama recorded in the Los Angeles garage of comedian Marc Maron. Midweek, the Supreme Court rejected the latest legal challenge to the Affordable Healthcare Act, his signature piece of legislation. Now on Friday — the same day that Obama welcomed the court’s landmark decision on gay marriage — the President solemnly presided over the funeral of Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine African-Americans murdered in a Charleston church last week. You can watch his eulogy above in its entirety, but we’re fast forwarding to the end, when, rather unexpectedly, the president led the congregation in singing Amazing Grace, a Christian hymn written in 1779 by John Newton. In an ironic historic footnote, Newton was the captain of English slave ships and wrote the spiritual song when his ship, buffeted by a storm, nearly met its demise. This marked the beginning of a spiritual conversion for Newton, during which he remained active in the slave trade. Only years later did he repent and focus his energy on abolishing slavery. He would write ‘Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,’ an influential tract that "described the horrors of the Slave Trade and his role in it." Like many things, the descendants of slaves took the good from "Amazing Grace" and made it their own. Note: the singing starts at the 35:20 mark if you really need to move things along. 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. via Mother Jones Related Content: 1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors President Obama Chats with David Simon About Drugs, The Wire & Omar Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War Free Online History Courses

Some of the most-referenced Western political thinkers—like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson—have taken hierarchies of class, race, or both, for granted. Not so some of their more radical contemporaries, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine, who made forceful arguments against inequality. A strain of utopianism runs through more egalitarian positions, and a calculating pragmatism through more libertarian. Rarely have these two threads woven neatly together. In the work of 20th century political philosopher John Rawls, they do, with maybe a knot or a kink here and there, in a unique philosophy first articulated in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, a novel attempt at reconciling abstract principles of liberty and equality (recently turned into a musical.) Like the Enlightenment philosophers before him, Rawls’ system of distributive justice invokes a thought experiment as the ground of his philosophy, but it is not an original myth, like the state of nature in nearly every early modern thinker, but an original position, as he calls it, of a society that lives behind a "veil of ignorance." In this condition, wrote Rawls: No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. Clearly, then, this idea presupposes the opposite of a meritocracy built on labor, conquest, or natural superiority. In fact, some of Rawls’ critics suggested, the "original position" presupposes a kind of nothingness, a state of incoherent nonexistence. What does it mean, after all, to exist without histories, differences, attributes, or aspirations? And how can we visualize an equality of conditions when no one experiences anything like it? What kind of position can possibly be "original"? To clarify his theory and answer reasonable objections, Rawls followed A Theory of Justice with a 1985 essay called "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." This rethinking coincided with a series of lecture classes he taught at Harvard in the 80s, which were eventually published in a 2001 book also titled Justice as Fairness, a promised "restatement" of the original position. Now we can hear these lectures, or most of them, with the rest to come, on Youtube. Get started with the first lecture in his 1984 seminar "Philosophy 171: Modern Political Philosophy," at the top, with lectures two and three above and below. There are six additional classes on the Harvard Philosophy Department’s Youtube channel, with a final two more to follow. (Get them all here.) In these talks, Rawls explains and expands on his core principles: equality of opportunity and the "difference principle," which states that any and all inequality should benefit the least well-off members of a society. Rawls’ brand of political liberalism (also a title of one of his books) has influenced presidents, judges, and legislators with arguments directly contrary to some of the right’s ideological architects, many of whom in fact wrote in reaction to Rawls. We are free to accept his claims or not, but Rawls’ significant contribution to the terms of modern political discourse is inarguable. This set of lectures will be added to our collection of 140 Free Online Philosophy Courses, a subset of our meta collection: 1100 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. via Daily Nous Related Content: A Theory of Justice, the Musical Imagines Philosopher John Rawls as a Time-Traveling Adventurer 6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated "School of Life" Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More An Introduction to the Political Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin Through His Free Writings & Audio Lectures Justice: Putting a Price Tag on Life & How to Measure Pleasure Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness   Free: Listen to John Rawls’ Course on "Modern Political Philosophy" (Recorded at Harvard, 1984) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Free: Listen to John Rawls’ Course on "Modern Political Philosophy" (Recorded at Harvard, 1984) appeared first on Open Culture.

Not too long ago, an older relative tried to donate the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia he’d owned since boyhood to a local charity shop, but they refused to take it. What an ignominious end to an institution that had followed him for seven decades and twice as many moves. Like many such weighty possessions, its provenance was sentimental, a graduation gift I believe, bestowed all at once, rather than purchased piecemeal from a traveling encyclopedia salesman. By the time I came along, its function had been reduced to the primarily decorative. Every now and then, he’d find some pretext to pull one of its many volumes from the shelf. Did I know that Tanzania was once called Tanganyika? And Thailand was once Siam! The vintage Funk & Wagnalls’ many facts, maps, and illustrations were not the only aspects in need of an update. Its pre-Women’s Lib, pre-Civil Rights attitudes were shocking to the point of camp. There was unintentional comic gold in those pages. A collage artist could’ve had a ball. Witness the success of the Encyclopedia Show, an ongoing performance event in Chicago. Multidisciplinary artist Guy Laramée takes a much more sober approach, above. Adieu, his sculptural repurposing of a 24-volume Encyclopedia Britannica feels like a memento mori for a dimly recalled ancestor of the information age. Quoth the artist: I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are. An enemy of 3D printing and other 21st-century technological advances, Laramée employs old fashioned power tools to accomplish his beautiful, destructive vision. What’s left is a deliberate wasteland. Kudos to filmmaker Sébastien Ventura for transcending mere documentation to deliver the befitting elegy at the top of the page. He presents us with a beautiful ruin. Whatever happened there, nature will reclaim it. You can see more of Laramée’s work at This Is Colossal. Related Content: Artist Takes Old Books and Gives Them New Life as Intricate Sculptures The Sketchbook Project Presents Online 17,000 Sketchbooks, Created by Artists from 135 Countries The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday Artist Turns 24-Volume Encyclopedia Britannica Set into a Beautifully Carved Landscape 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 Artist Turns 24-Volume Encyclopedia Britannica Set into a Beautifully Carved Landscape appeared first on Open Culture.

Most of us come to know the work of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel through his children’s books (I, for instance, remember Hop on Pop as the first book I could read whole), and while he remains most famous as a prolific teller and illustrator of surreally didactic tales for youngsters, his productivity entered other cultural areas as well. Perhaps the most surprising chapter of his career happened during the Second World War, when Seuss, who had already demonstrated his strong anti-Hitler, anti-Mussolini, and pro-Roosevelt sentiments in political cartoons, went to work scripting propaganda films. Having joined the U.S. Army in 1943 as a Captain, Seuss went on to take charge of the Animation Department of the Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit. Working under Frank Capra toward the end of the war, he wrote the short films Your Job in Germany and Our Job in Japan, both intended to get American soldiers into the right mindset for the occupations of those defeated countries. "With your conduct and attitude while inside Germany, you can lay the groundwork of a peace that could last forever," says the narrator of the former, "Or just the opposite." Unlike the similarly G.I.-targeted Private Snafu cartoons we featured last year, nothing of Seuss’ fanciful style comes through in these films, which use all-too-real footage to illustrate to "our boys" as vividly as possible what could go wrong if they let their guard down in these only-just-former enemy territories. "The German lust for conquest is not dead," the narrator warns, "it’s merely gone undercover."  The German people, he insists, "must prove they have been cured beyond the shadow of a doubt before they ever again are allowed to take their place among respectable nations." Our Job in Japan also holds out the prospect of a prolonged peace — "peace, if we can solve the problem of 70 million Japanese people." But this short doesn’t have quite as damning a tone as Your Job in Germany; instead, it focuses on how best to rehabilitate an "old, backward, superstitious country" full of impressionable people "trained to follow blindly wherever their leaders led them." According to the script, the eminently teachable and adaptable "Japanese brain" just happened to fall under the sway of warlords who decided it could "be hopped up to fight with fanatical fury." Patronizing, certainly, but a far cry from the popular conception in the west at the time of the Japanese as a cruel, power-mad race inherently bent on bloodshed. Seuss himself had a history of anti-Japanese cartooning (also featured on our site), but it seems his views had already begun to turn by the time of Our Job in Japan, which argues only for setting an example demonstrating that "what we like to call the American Way, or democracy, or just plain old Golden Rule common sense is a pretty good way to live." As a result, no less a player in the Pacific theater than Douglas MacArthur found the film excessively sympathetic to the Japanese and tried to have it suppressed, a kind of controversy that never erupted around the likes of Hop on Pop. But as far as the actual winning of Japanese hearts and minds goes, I suspect Seuss’ children’s books have done a better job. Related Content: New Archive Showcases Dr. Seuss’s Early Work as an Advertising Illustrator and Political Cartoonist Private Snafu: The World War II Propaganda Cartoons Created by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who! Donald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Other Disney Propaganda Cartoons from World War II "The Ducktators": Loony Tunes Turns Animation into Wartime Propaganda (1942) 200 Ansel Adams Photographs Expose the Rigors of Life in Japanese Internment Camps During WW II 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. Dr. Seuss’ World War II Propaganda Films: Your Job in Germany (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946) 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 Dr. Seuss’ World War II Propaganda Films: Your Job in Germany (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946) appeared first on Open Culture.

Paul McCartney became a vegetarian in 1975, thanks to his wife Linda, who campaigned for animal rights before it became fashionable, and later wrote internationally bestselling vegetarian cookbooks. Decades later, Sir Paul still remains committed to the cause, encouraging people to skip eating meat once a week — see his Meatless Mondays web site — and persuading figures like the Dalai Lama to walk the walk. Above you can watch the Paul McCartney-narrated film, Glass Walls. It works on his theory that "if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian." That is, if you saw how most every carnivorous meal starts with absurd amounts of suffering suffering, you might question whether you personally want to support this. Glass Walls will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Watch Glass Walls, Paul McCartney’s Case for Going Vegetarian is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Watch Glass Walls, Paul McCartney’s Case for Going Vegetarian appeared first on Open Culture.

While the print magazine industry as a whole has seen better days, publications dedicated to women’s fashion still go surprisingly strong. Perhaps as a result, they’ve continued to attract criticism, not least for their highly specific, often highly altered visions of the supposedly ideal body image emblazoned across their covers. One critic called it an "overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty," with nearly all of the women on display "immensely elongated" with narrow hips and "slender, non-prehensile hands like those of a lizard." This hardly counts as a recent phenomenon; that particular criticism comes from 1946, the critic none other than Animal Farm and 1984 author George Orwell. He lodged his complaint against an "American fashion magazine which shall be nameless" in his "As I Please" column for the British Tribune. The New Republic, which subsequently ran Orwell’s broadside stateside, re-published it on their web site last year. On the magazine’s cover Orwell sees a photograph of "the usual elegant female, standing on a chair while a gray-haired, spectacled, crushed-looking man in shirtsleeves kneels at her feet" — a tailor about to take a measurement. "But to a casual glance he looks as though he were kissing the hem of the woman’s garment—not a bad symbolical picture of American civilization." But this wouldn’t count as an Orwellian indictment of the state of Western society without a harsh assessment of the language used, and the author of "Politics and the English Language" doesn’t neglect to make one here. In the fashion magazine Orwell finds "an extraordinary mixture of sheer lushness with clipped and sometimes very expensive technical jargon. Words like suave-mannered, custom-finished, contour-conforming, mitt-back, inner-sole, backdip, midriff, swoosh, swash, curvaceous, slenderize and pet-smooth are flung about with evident full expectation that the reader will understand them at a glance. Here are a few sample sentences taken at random": "A new Shimmer Sheen color that sets your hands and his head in a whirl." "Bared and beautifully bosomy." "Feathery-light Milliken Fleece to keep her kitten-snug!" "Others see you through a veil of sheer beauty, and they wonder why!" "An exclamation point of a dress that depends on fluid fabric for much of its drama." "The miracle of figure flattery!" "Molds your bosom into proud feminine lines." "Isn’t it wonderful to know that Corsets wash and wear and whittle you down… even though they weigh only four ounces!" "The distilled witchery of one woman who was forever desirable… forever beloved… Forever Amber." And so on and so on and so on. From what I can tell by the fashion magazines of 2015 my girlfriend leaves around the house, while the specific terminology might have changed, the brand-strewn overall wordscape of meaninglessness and obscurantism remains. Orwell surely didn’t foresee that lamentable linguistic and aesthetic situation changing any time soon — though it might surprise him that, despite it all, American civilization itself, in its characteristically unsleek, inelegant, and provisional way, has continued lumbering on. You can read Orwell’s short essay on Fashion here. Related Content: George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf (1940) George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Circa 1921) George Orwell and Douglas Adams Explain How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You! 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. George Orwell Blasts American Fashion Magazines (1946) 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 George Orwell Blasts American Fashion Magazines (1946) appeared first on Open Culture.

Thomas Hardy—architect, poet, and writer (above)—gave us the fierce, stormy romance Far From the Madding Crowd, currently impressing critics in a film adaptation by Thomas Vinterberg. He also gave us Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure, books whose persistently grim outlook might make them too depressing by far were it not for Hardy’s engrossing prose, unforgettable characterization, and, perhaps most importantly, unshakable sense of place. Hardy set most of his novels in a region he called Wessex, which—much like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha—is a thinly fictionalized recreation of his rural hometown of Dorchester and its surrounding counties. Now, thanks to the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, we can learn all about this ancient region in South West England, and Hardy’s transmutation of it, through Hardy’s own proof copy of a 1905 book by Frank R. Heath called Dorchester (Dorset) and its Surroundings, with revisions in Hardy’s hand. In the excerpt above, for example, from page 36 of this scholarly work, the author discusses Hardy’s use of Dorchester in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the so-called "Wessex Poems." In the margins on the right, we see Hardy’s corrections and glosses. Though this may not seem the most exciting piece of Hardy memorabilia, for students of the author and his investment in a rural corner of England, it is indeed a treasure. The Hardy archive also contains scans of the author’s correspondence, manuscripts and signed typescripts, and architectural drawings, like that of St. Juliot’s Church in Cornwall, above. This extensive digital Hardy collection is but one of many housed in the Ransom Center’s Project Reveal, an acronym for "Read and View English & American Literature." Read and view you can indeed, through the intimacy of first drafts, manuscripts, personal writing, and other ephemera. See, for example, a handwritten draft of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, in French, (excerpt above). Below, we have a handwritten list of Robert Louis Stevenson’s favorite books, and further down, a manuscript draft of Katherine Mansfield’s "Now I am a plant, a weed" from her personal poetry notebook. Other authors included in the Project Reveal archive include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hart Crane, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and William Thackeray. The project, writes the Ransom Center in a press release, generated more than 22,000 high-resolution images, available for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction or fees" (but with attribution). The literary storehouse on display here only adds to an already essential collection of artifacts the Ransom Center houses, such as the papers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, syllabi, annotated books, and manuscripts from David Foster Wallace, scrapbooks of Harry Houdini, and the first known photograph ever taken. See a complete list of contents of the Ransom Center’s Digital Collections here, and learn more about this amazing library in the heart of Texas at their main site. Related Content: Library of Congress Launches New Online Poetry Archive, Featuring 75 Years of Classic Poetry Readings Yale Launches an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression Literary Remains of Gabriel García Márquez Will Rest in Texas David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness New Archive Offers Free Access to 22,000 Literary Documents From Great British & American Writers 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 New Archive Offers Free Access to 22,000 Literary Documents From Great British & American Writers appeared first on Open Culture.

"What is Bresson’s genre? He doesn’t have one. Bresson is Bresson," wrote master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in his seminal book Sculpting in Time. "The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb." Nonetheless, Tarkovsky made two of the most praised, best-regarded science fiction films in cinema. Stalker (watch it online) is a metaphysical riddle wrapped in the trappings of a sci-fi thriller. In the verdant area called the Zone, ringed off by miles of barbed wire and armed soldiers, pilgrims come to behold an uncanny landscape ruled by a powerful, otherworldly intelligence. The film seemed to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that happened years later and proved to be the unlikely inspiration for a video game. Adapted from a novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (watch online) is about a space station that orbits a sentient planet that causes hallucinations in the cosmonauts. The hyper-rational protagonist, Kris Kelvin, is thrown for a loop when he is confronted by a doppelganger of his dead wife who killed herself years earlier. The logical side of him knows that this is a hallucination but he falls in love anyway, only to lose her again. Kelvin is caught in a hell of repeating the mistakes of his past. Solaris was seen as a Cold War-era response to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both movies are mind-altering deep-space epics that raise more questions than they answer. Yet Tarkovsky hated 2001’s ostentatious use of cutting-edge special effects. "For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future," he told Russian film journalist Naum Abramov in 1970. "More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phony on many points, even for specialists. For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated." Indeed, Tarkovsky seemed to deliberately half-ass the generic elements of film. He used leisurely shots of tunnels and highways of 1971 Tokyo to depict the city of the future. He devoted only a couple minutes of the film’s nearly three hour running time to things like spaceships. And you have to love the fact that the space station in Solaris has such distinctly unfuturistic design elements as a chandelier and a wood-paneled library. Tarkovsky, of course, isn’t interested in science. He’s interested in art and its way to evoke the divine. And his primary way of doing this is with long takes; epic shots that resonate profoundly even if the meaning of those images remains elusive. Solaris opens with a shot of water flowing in a brook and then, later in the scene, there is a sudden downpour. The camera presses into a shot of a teacup filling with rain. It’s a beautiful, memorable, evocative shot. Maybe the image means something. Maybe its beauty is, in and of itself, its meaning. Either way, Tarkovsky forces you to surrender to his deliberate cinematic rhythm and his pantheistic view of the world. In a piece called Tarkovsky Shot by Shot, video essayist Antonios Papantoniou dissects a few scenes from Solaris, breaking down each according to camera angle, shot type and duration while pointing out recurring visual motifs. "Diametrically different from Hollywood’s extravagant moviemaking Tarkovsky’s Solaris is in a cinematic universe of its own," writes Papantoniou in one of the video’s copious intertitles. "Symbolic images and metaphysical manifestations are created and expressed in a poetic way where every visual detail matters." Watching Shot by Shot, you get a real sense of just how beautifully his films unfold with those gorgeously choreographed long takes. You can watch the full video above. via Indie Wire Related Content: Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online Watch Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bending Masterpiece Free Online The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema A Poet in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Filmmaking and Life 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.

Last year, we highlighted a 1956 video from RCA Victor which demonstrated how vinyl records were made back in the good old days. If you have 23 free minutes, you can get a pretty good look at the production process — the live audio recording, the making of a master disc, the production of a mold, the eventual mass production of vinyl records, etc. Almost 60 years later, vinyl is making a comeback. So why not let Ben Krasnow, a hardware engineer at Google X, give us a much more modern perspective on the LP? Above, watch Krasnow’s stop motion animation, made with an electron microscope, which shows us a phonograph needle riding through grooves on an LP. Much of the 9-minute video offers a fairly technical primer on what went into making this stop motion clip in the first place. So if you want to get to the action, fast forward to the 4:20 mark. If you hang with Krasnow’s video, you can also see him take some microscopic looks at other media formats — CD-ROMs, early forms of DVDs, and more. via Devour 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: How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956 (That’s Relevant in 2014) How to Clean Your Vinyl Records with Wood Glue World Records: New Photo Exhibit Pays Tribute to the Era of Vinyl Records & Turntables Watch a Needle Ride Through LP Record Grooves Under an Electron Microscope is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Watch a Needle Ride Through LP Record Grooves Under an Electron Microscope appeared first on Open Culture.

With her buttoned-up style, work with the UN, and name like a plucky character in a certain English wizard series, Delia Derbyshire may not seem a likely pioneer of experimental electronic music. But her work in the sixties and seventies indeed made her a forerunner of so much contemporary electronic music that most every current legend in the business—from Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers to Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, who calls her work "quite amazing" and "timeless"—credits her in some way or another. If you’ve never heard of Derbyshire, you can learn about her life and work in the 2010 BBC Radio 4 documentary above, "Sculptress of Sound." As we recently noted in an earlier post, Derbyshire occupies a prominent place in the history of women in the field. She has also worked with everyone from Doctor Who composer Ron Grainer (who took sole credit for their work together) to Paul McCartney. Well almost. McCartney—a huge fan of Derbyshire’s work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop—considered collaborating with her on an early version of "Yesterday," then went with strings instead. But her near hit with the Beatles showed just how far she had come since joining the BBC as a trainee studio manager in 1960. The previous year, Decca records rejected her application, telling her point blank that they did not hire women for studio work. For contractual reasons, Derbyshire made many of her radio compositions under pseudonyms, and she may have been frustrated by her near-obscurity. She did withdraw from music in the mid-seventies, not to reappear until a few years before her death in 2001. But perhaps her departure had nothing to do with lack of fame. Derbyshire had the highest of technical standards and a mathematical approach to making music. Once commercial synthesizers became available, she felt that making electronic music had become too easy and her enthusiasm waned. The new music bored her, and instead of trying to hold on to her relevance, she made a graceful exit. It’s only in recent years that Derbyshire has become recognized for the pioneer she was. See her above profiled in a 2009 short documentary, "The Delian Mode," by Kara Blake. Featured are Derbyshire’s innovative techniques with manipulated tape machines and found sounds for her TV and film scores and her original compositions under her own name and with influential early electro-pop band White Noise. The Guardian called Derbyshire’s way of making music "an analytical approach to synthesiz[ing] complex sounds from electronic sources." Her degree in mathematics informed her way of working, as did her conception of herself not primarily as a composer, but also as a scientist. "I suppose in a way," she said of her painstakingly-created scores, "I was experimenting in psycho-acoustics." Many of her experiments sound as fresh today as they did at the time, ready to inspire several more generations of composers and musicians. You can dip into an archive of Derbyshire’s music over at UBU.com. Related Content: Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014) Meet the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ "Yesterday" Into Early Electronica Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

A few months ago, Mental Floss put up a post of "Fantastic 120-Year-Old Color Pictures of Ireland." Fantastic pictures indeed, although the nature of the technology that produced them seems as interesting to me as the 19th-century Irish life captured in the images themselves. They came from the Library of Congress’ geographically organized archive of photocrom prints, a method perhaps known only to die-hard historical photography enthusiasts. For the rest of us, the Library of Congress’ page on the photocrom process explains it: "Photochrom prints are ink-based images produced through ‘the direct photographic transfer of an original negative onto litho and chromographic printing plates.'" Its inventor Hans Jakob Schmid came up with the technique in the 1880s, a decade that began with color photography consigned to the realm of theory. While Photocrom prints may look an awful lot like color photographs, look at them through a magnifying glass and "the small dots that comprise the ink-based photomechanical image are visible." "The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints," each color requiring "a separate asphalt-coated lithographic stone, usually a minimum of six stones and often more than ten stones." But that unwieldy-sounding technology and laborious-sounding process has given us, among other striking pieces of visual history, these lush images of fin de siècle Venice, which the writer of place Jan Morris once described as "less a city than an experience." At the top of the post, we have a view of the Rialto Bridge, which spans one of the city’s famous canals; below that a scene of pigeon-feeding in St. Mark’s Piazza; the image just above leaves the pigeons behind to view the interior of St. Mark’s Basilica. The photos below, all also taken between 1890 and 1900, depict the exterior and interior of the Doge’s Palace, as well as its view of San Giorgio Island by moonlight. We may not consider these "real" color photographs, but the colors they present, vividly applied in the printing process, somehow more accurately represent the spirit of late 19th-century Europe — one of history’s truly vivid periods, in one of its enduringly vivid human environments. More color images of fin-de-siecle Venice can be viewed here. via Mental Floss Related Content: Take a Virtual Tour of Venice (Its Streets, Plazas & Canals) with Google Street View How Venice Works: A Short Film Venice in a Day: From Daybreak to Sunset in Timelapse Venice is Way Under Water… Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan The First Color Photos From World War I: The German Front The Oldest Color Movies Bring Sunflowers, Exotic Birds and Goldfish Back to Life (1902) One of the Earliest Known Photos of Guys Sitting Around and Drinking Beer (Circa 1845) 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. Venice in Beautiful Color Images 125 Years Ago: The Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/venice-in-beautiful-color-images-125-years-ago.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Venice in Beautiful Color Images 125 Years Ago: The Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace & More appeared first on Open Culture.

In its second decade, cinema struggled to evolve. The first films by the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison were short and gimmicky - shots of trains racing towards the screen, couples kissing and cute kittens getting fed. A quick rush. A bit of fun. Its creators didn’t see much past the novelty of cinema but then other filmmakers like Georges Méliès, Edwin S Porter, Alice Guy-Blaché and D.W. Griffith started injecting this new medium with elements of story. It started aspiring towards art. To this end, filmmakers started to expand the canvas on which they created. Films that were just two to eight minutes lengthened in duration as their stories grew in complexity. The first feature-length movie came in 1906 with the Australian movie The Story of the Kelly Gang. In 1915, D.W. Griffith premiered his racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, which crystallized film language and proved that longer movies could be financially successful. In between those two movies came L’Inferno (1911) - perhaps the finest cinematic adaptation of Dante’s Inferno out there and the first feature-length Italian movie ever. Like Griffith, the makers of L’Inferno - Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro - sought to raise cinema to the ranks of literature and theater. Unlike Griffith, they didn’t really do much to forward the language of cinema. Throughout L’Inferno, the camera remains wide and locked down like the proscenium of a stage. Instead, they focused their efforts on creating gloriously baroque sets and costumes. Much of the film looks like it was pulled straight from Gustave Dorè’s famed illustrations of The Divine Comedy. Yet seeing a picture in a book of a demon is one thing. Seeing it leap around lashing the naked backs of the damned is something else entirely. If you were ever tempted by the sin of simony, you’ll think twice after seeing this film. L’Inferno — now added to our collection of 700 Free Movies Online — became both a critical and commercial hit worldwide, raking in over $2 million (roughly $48 million in today’s money) in the US alone. "We have never seen anything more precious and fine than those pictures. Images of hell appear in all their greatness and power," gushed famed Italian novelist and reporter Matilde Serao when the film came out. American film critic for The Moving Picture World, W. Stephen Bush, was even more effusive: "I know no higher commendation of the work than mention of the fact that the film-makers have been exceedingly faithful to the words of the poet. They have followed, in letter and in spirit, his conceptions. They have sat like docile scholars at the feet of the master, conscientiously and to the best of their ability obeying every suggestion for his genius, knowing no inspiration, except such as came from the fountainhead. Great indeed has been their reward. They have made Dante intelligible to the masses. The immortal work, whose beauties until now were accessible only to a small band of scholars, has now after a sleep of more than six centuries become the property of mankind." Of course, the film’s combination of ghoulishness and nudity made it ripe to be co-opted by shady producers who had less that lofty motives. Scenes from L’Inferno were cut into such exploitation flicks as Hell-O-Vision (1936) and Go Down, Death! (1944). You can watch the full movie above. Be sure to watch to the end where Satan himself can be seen devouring Brutus and Cassius. Related Content: 40 Great Filmmakers Go Old School, Shoot Short Films with 100 Year Old Camera What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Camera and 52 Seconds of Film A Trip to the Moon (and Five Other Free Films) by Georges Méliès, the Father of Special Effects Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Watch L’Inferno (1911), Italy’s First Feature Film and Perhaps the Finest Adaptation of Dante’s Classic is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Watch L’Inferno (1911), Italy’s First Feature Film and Perhaps the Finest Adaptation of Dante’s Classic appeared first on Open Culture.

I recently heard someone say his college-bound nephew asked him, "What’s a union?" Whether you love unions, loathe them, or remain indifferent, the fact that an ostensibly educated young person might have such a significant gap in their knowledge should cause concern. A historic labor conflict, after all, provided the occasion for Ronald Reagan to prove his bona fides to the new conservative movement that swept him into power. His crushing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981 set the tone for the ensuing 30 years or so of economic policy, with the labor movement fighting an uphill battle all the way. Prior to that defining event, unions held sway over politics local and national, and had consolidated power blocks in the American political landscape through decades of struggle against oppressive and dehumanizing working conditions. In practical terms, unions have stood in the way of capital’s unceasing search for cheap labor and new consumer markets; in social and cultural terms, the politics of labor have represented a formidable ideological challenge to conservatives as well, by way of a vibrant assemblage of anarchists, civil libertarians, anti-colonialists, communists, environmentalists, pacifists, feminists, socialists, etc. A host of radical isms flourished among organized workers especially in the decades between the 1870s and the 1970s, finding their voice in newsletters, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets, and posters—fragile mediums that do not often weather well the ravages of time. Thus the advent of digital archives has been a boon for students and historians of workers’ movements and other populist political groundswells. One such archive, the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, has recently announced the digitization of over 2,200 posters from their collection, a database that spans the globe and the spectrum of leftist political speech and iconography. We have cleverly-designed visual puns like the Chicago Industrial Workers of the World poster just above, titled "What is what in the world of labor?" Promoting itself as "One Big Union of All Labor," the IWW made some of the most ambitious propaganda, like the 1912 poster (middle) in which an "Industrial Co-Operative Commonwealth" replaces the tyranny of the capitalist, who is told by his "trust manager" peer, "Our rule is ended, dismount and go to work." In this post-revolutionary fantasy, the IWW promises that "A few hours of useful work insure all a luxurious living," though it only hints at the details of this utopian arrangement. Up top, we have an ornate May Day poster from 1895 by Walter Crane, hoping for a "Merrie England" with "No Child Toilers," "Production for Use Not For Profit," and "The Land For the People," among other, more nationalist, sentiments like "England Should Feed Her Own People." "While all of the posters were scanned at high resolution," writes Hyperallergic, "they appear online as thumbnails with navigation to zoom." You can download the images, but only the smaller, thumbnail size in most cases. These hundreds of posters represent "just a portion of the material in the Labadie Collection"—named for a "Detroit-area labor organizer, anarchist, and author" who "had the idea for the social protest archive at the university in 1911." You can view other political artifacts in the UMich library’s digital collections here, including anarchist pamphlets, political buttons, and a digital photo collection. The collection as a whole gives us a potentially inspiring, or infuriating, mosaic of political thought at its boldest and most graphically assertive from a time before online petitions and hashtag campaigns took over as the primary circulators of popular radical thought. via Hyperallergic (where you can find some other big, visually striking posters) Related Content: The Red Menace: A Striking Gallery of Anti-Communist Posters, Ads, Comic Books, Magazines & Films Unz.org: A New, Vast and Slightly Right-Wing Archive of Magazines, Books and TV Shows Wonderfully Kitschy Propaganda Posters Champion the Chinese Space Program (1962-2003) Free Online Political Science Courses Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 2,200 Radical Political Posters Digitized: A New Archive is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/2200-radical-political-posters-digitized-a-new-archive.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post 2,200 Radical Political Posters Digitized: A New Archive appeared first on Open Culture.

Plenty of us get tuned in to the Beats through print — maybe a yellowed copy of Howl, a mass-market Naked Lunch, a fifth- or sixth-hand On the Road — but sometimes the verse or prose that so thrills us on those pages fairly demands to be spoken aloud, preferably by the Beat in question. That may have proven a tricky desire to fulfill in decades past, but now Spotify has made it nearly effortless to hear the Beats whenever we like: you can find over eighteen hours of material on a playlist called, straightforwardly enough, The Beats. These 249 tracks include not just figures like the previously alluded to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, but other beloved Beats such as Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky — and Charles Bukowski, not a figure one necessarily associates closely with that movement. Some Bukowski and/or Beat enthusiasts will tell you that each would have nothing to do with the other. Yet the hard-living poet and self-confessed "dirty old man" occasionally admitted to something approaching fondness for certain members of the supposedly higher-minded counterculture: "He’s better to have around than not to have around," Bukowski once said of Ginsberg. "Without his coming through, none of us would be writing as well as we are doing now, which is not well enough, but we hang on." With the Beats’ Spotify playlist, you can judge for yourself not only whether they and Bukowski wrote "well enough" (though literary history seems to have proven that piece of self-deprecation wrong), but also whether they spoke well enough — or rather, whether they performed their own work in the way you’d always imagined it in your head. Whatever your assessment, rest assured you won’t hear voices like Ginsberg’s, Burroughs’ and especially Bukowski’s anywhere else. If you don’t have the Spotify software itself yet, no problem: you can download it free here. Related Content: Naropa Archive Presents 5,000 Hours of Audio Recordings of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs & Other Beat Writers Rare Footage of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac & Other Beats Hanging Out in the East Village (1959) A Reading of Charles Bukowski’s First Published Story, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip" (1944) Listen to Charles Bukowski Poems Being Read by Bukowski Himself & the Great Tom Waits Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968) 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.

At first blush, Yasujiro Ozu and Wes Anderson would seem to be miles apart. Ozu is the "most Japanese" of all directors. His films are small, quiet, finely calibrated works that document the slow reordering of the family unit in the face of Japan’s rapid modernization. Anderson’s movies are twee and whimsical, filled with wry humor and a shocking amount of violence against dogs. Yet video essayist Anna Catley in her piece Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: A Visual Essay makes a pretty compelling case that these two auteurs are more similar than you might think. Both filmmakers have a clear and highly stylized manner of constructing their movies: Ozu’s films are characterized by symmetrical compositions and an unmoving camera that remains about two and a half feet off of the ground. Anderson’s movies are marked by symmetrical compositions, long complex camera moves and lots of overhead shots. Both Ozu and Anderson have a stable of actors that they work with repeatedly — Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara for Ozu, Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray for Anderson. Both filmmakers’ movies are about the complex, often fraught, relationships between parents and children. And both directors often employed the point of view of children to highlight adult hypocrisy and disappointment. Ozu’s movies, however, were relatively free of Cat Stevens songs. You can watch the full video above. It might just make you watch a double feature of Ohayo and Moonrise Kingdom. via Indie Wire Related Content: Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums & More Wes Anderson’s Favorite Films: Moonstruck, Rosemary’s Baby, and Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel Watch Wes Anderson’s Charming New Short Film, Castello Cavalcanti, Starring Jason Schwartzman Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bottle Rocket (1992) 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. Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/wes-anderson-yasujiro-ozu.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers appeared first on Open Culture.

When Martin Scorsese isn’t making films, he’s busy preserving them, from helping fund the restoration of classics to collecting the ephemera of his youth, especially posters. A selection of his movie poster collection, representing the height of film advertising from the 1930’s to the 1960s, currently hangs at MoMA through October 25, 2015. The power that a poster held in the imagination decades ago should not be understated. For many it was the only knowledge they had about the film they were about to see, and many artists, hired in house by the studios, hyped up the sexiest parts of the films. It sold tickets. The MoMA exhibit is centered on the billboard sized poster for Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), a stunning work when seen large. (For an understanding about the impressive size of most posters, check out this graphic.) It’s only because of collectors like Scorsese and Ira. M. Resnick (for whose book Scorsese wrote an introduction) that the artists behind these posters have been named and recognized. Although the MoMA web page promoting the exhibition is surprisingly stingy when it comes to naming all the artists in the show, some internet sleuthing brings up some names. The illustrator behind the Hoffmann poster, Marc Stone, was also a painter of World War II propaganda posters in the UK. The minimal, Risko-esque rendering of Veronica Lake for Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is credited to Maurice Kallis, though an anonymous comment on the movie poster blog Citizen K. credits it to Fritz Siebel, the commenter’s father. Siebel, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vienna, wound up illustrating A Fly Went By for Dr. Seuss’ children’s book imprint and creating the famous Yul Brynner-lookalike and cleaning product mascot Mr. Clean. René Péron, who created the beautiful Expressionistic design for Erich von Stroheim’s The Lost Squadron (1932) started his career with posters for silent classics like Abel Gance’s Napoleon and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). But he’s probably best known for the iconic caricature of Jacques Tati gracing the poster for Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Both the poster for Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and Kazan’s On the Waterfront are by one of the Italian kings of movie posters, Anselmo Ballester. His style is lurid and pulpy, and if there is one dame in distress in a movie, he would make her the selling point of the poster. He was also known for his love of Rita Hayworth, for whom he would produce his best work. (Just look at this poster for Salome, which is way more interesting than the picture it represents.) Lastly, Scorsese has added one of his own film’s posters: Peter Strausfeld’s stunning woodblock poster for Mean Streets. The British artist had a very particular style (text on one side, graphic on the other), and was hired by the Academy Cinema in London as their designer. (Now, *that’s* a job.) The fact that we can watch trailers on our televisions and now iPhones has long diminished the power of the poster. However, there are still signs of life in the industry, and the amount of artists creating beautiful limited edition prints of posters for their favorite films increases every year. via Quartz Related content: 50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark 100 Greatest Posters of Film Noir Martin Scorsese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preservation) Gaze at Global Movie Posters for Hitchcock’sVertigo: U.S., Japan, Italy, Poland & Beyond The Strange and Wonderful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More 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. A Look Inside Martin Scorsese’s Vintage Movie Poster Collection is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/a-look-inside-martin-scorseses-vintage-movie-poster-collection.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. The post A Look Inside Martin Scorsese’s Vintage Movie Poster Collection appeared first on Open Culture.