Django at 100

Djan­go Rein­hardt, one of Europe’s finest jazz gui­tar play­ers, would have turned 100 on Jan­u­ary 24. It’s fair­ly aston­ish­ing to think that he mas­tered the gui­tar as he did, ele­vat­ing it to a lead jazz instru­ment, despite being self taught, and hav­ing lost the use of two fin­gers in a fire. (More on that in the LA Times.) Above, we fea­ture Djan­go and his group, Quin­tette du Hot Club de France, per­form­ing “J’At­tendrai” (I Will Wait) in 1939. As you’ll note, he only has two fin­gers mov­ing on the frets.

Notre Dame Marching Band Performs “This Too Shall Pass”

The Notre Dame March­ing Band hit the field (a real field), where they per­formed OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass.” The per­for­mance was arranged by Notre Dame’s direc­tor of bands, Dr. Ken Dye. And it was all record­ed live on the spot. You can watch the video in a larg­er for­mat here. Inci­den­tal­ly, if you’re not famil­iar with OK Go’s music, you can watch them per­form an acoustic ver­sion here.

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Tweets of the Week (2/13)

Why let good tweets (and re-tweets) go to waste? Each week, we’re going to list some of the cul­tur­al good­ies that appeared in our Twit­ter stream. You can start fol­low­ing Open Cul­ture on Twit­ter here.

Picasso Painting on Glass

A deeply mem­o­rable scene. Picas­so at his home in Val­lau­ris, paint­ing on glass with a cam­era rolling on the oth­er side. The scene is an out­take from Vis­ite à Picas­so (A Vis­it with Picas­so), a 1950 film by Bel­gian film­mak­er Paul Hae­saerts. The full film, run­ning 20 min­utes, can be watched in its entire­ty on Vimeo (or right below). You can find this film in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online. For good mea­sure, we have also added an excerpt from the 1956 film Le Mys­tere Picas­so, by Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot, oth­er­wise known for Les dia­boliques (1955). The film is avail­able on YouTube in two parts: Part 1Part 2.

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Hyperspace to Berlin, Watch Metropolis Live

Restored ‘Metropolis’ to Stream Live on Friday

Clas­sic film buffs take note. Roger Ebert writes:

The eager­ly await­ed restored ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s silent clas­sic “Metrop­o­lis” will steam live on the inter­net on Fri­day Feb. 12. In Amer­i­ca, it can be see in the after­noon. It’s said that near­ly an hour of footage, long thought to be lost, has been added. The footage was dis­cov­ered in a film archive in Buenos Aires.… It will be streamed via web­sites in both Ger­man and France. The actu­al film is sched­uled to start play­ing at 1:40 PM CST, Chica­go time.”

The French site stream­ing the film can be found here, and the Ger­man site here.

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

This imag­i­na­tive bit was a stu­den­t’s final project for an art course. The flip­book, made entire­ly out of biro pens, was cre­at­ed with 2100 pages of draw­ings and took about 3 weeks to devel­op. Need­less to say, the stu­dent got an A.

Thanks to @kirstinbutler for flag­ging this one.

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10,000 Galaxies in 3D

In 2004, the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope cap­tured 10,000 galax­ies in an image that’s now called the Ultra Deep Field. It’s our deep­est look into the uni­verse. The video above ani­mates the Deep Field image and puts it into 3D. No need to read more. Just watch.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.