William S. Burroughs Shoots Shakespeare

Even at the age of 81, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs was still resist­ing lit­er­ary con­ven­tion. This footage was shot in Lawrence, Kansas, just two years before his death in 1997.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus Van Sant Adapts William S. Bur­roughs: An Ear­ly 16mm Short

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His First Nov­el, Junky

William S. Bur­roughs’ “The Thanks­giv­ing Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant

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For Neda: The New HBO Documentary Now Online

Almost a year ago, the Green Rev­o­lu­tion was ignit­ed in Iran when Ahmadine­jad and the rul­ing cler­ics stole an elec­tion from Mir-Hos­sein Mousavi and his mil­lions of sup­port­ers. A young gen­er­a­tion, intent upon putting Mousavi in office, took to the streets en masse. Protests broke out across the nation … until the holy men decid­ed they had had enough. Ulti­mate­ly, bul­lets put an end to the nascent demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ment (at least for now), and the bru­tal­i­ty of the regime was cap­tured in mov­ing images watched world­wide: they showed us a young woman, Neda, get­ting indis­crim­i­nate­ly gunned down by a sniper, her eyes star­ing at us as she lay dying in the streets. Above, we’re fea­tur­ing a new­ly released HBO doc­u­men­tary that intro­duces you to Neda Agha-Soltan and her life sto­ry. Writ­ten and direct­ed by the award win­ning film­mak­er Antony Thomas, the 70 minute film was cre­at­ed with a fair amount of risk, and it includes inter­views with Neda’s fam­i­ly in Iran. The Iran­ian regime, nat­u­ral­ly doing its best to stop cit­i­zens from see­ing the film, plans to release its own doc­u­men­tary, putting the offi­cial spin on the mur­der.

For Neda has been added to our grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online. You can learn more about the film on the HBO web­site.

via 3quarksdaily. H/T to Mike.

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John Wooden Defines True Success

Back in 1934, John Wood­en start­ed flesh­ing out his def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess – some­thing that shaped his teach­ing and coach­ing for decades to come. His def­i­n­i­tion is not about pow­er, pres­tige, and mate­r­i­al pos­ses­sions. It’s about some­thing more uplift­ing. Filmed back at the TED con­fer­ence in 2001, Wood­en elab­o­rates on this phi­los­o­phy hand­ed down by his father. RIP coach and teacher.

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The Secret Powers of Time

Philip Zim­bar­do, a long­time Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor, is per­haps most well known for the famous Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment con­duct­ed in 1971. But, more recent­ly, he pub­lished a book called The Time Para­dox (2008) that makes some pret­ty intrigu­ing argu­ments about how our atti­tudes toward time, often uncon­scious ones, can strong­ly shape our per­son­al­i­ties and the kind of lives we lead. The video above takes one of Zim­bar­do’s lec­tures about the Time Para­dox and syncs it with some ani­mat­ed draw­ings. Great find by Yann. Feel free to send tips our way. Just click here.

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Birds in the Oil

So far, the BP oil spill has remained fair­ly abstract. We’ve seen it depict­ed in graphs and satel­lite images. Now we get to see it right up close. These pho­tos show in bru­tal detail exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing to the wildlife in the Gulf of Mex­i­co. Con­sid­er the pho­tos a very quick glimpse into the larg­er envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter caused by this spill. Spread these pic­tures far and wide. BP does­n’t deserve to keep this mess a dis­tant idea.

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“Big Data” Comes to the Humanities

Fast for­ward a gen­er­a­tion, and you might hard­ly rec­og­nize the human­i­ties. Big data is here, and it’s allow­ing tech savvy stu­dents to take a whole new approach to “read­ing” texts. Using Google’s dig­i­tal library and oth­er tools pow­ered by high pow­er com­put­ing, stu­dents can now quan­ti­ta­tive­ly ana­lyze large bod­ies of lit­er­a­ture and draw new con­clu­sions about the evo­lu­tion of ideas, lan­guage, and cul­ture. (More on this here.) Some wor­ry that these “stat-hap­py quants” risk tak­ing “the human out of the human­i­ties.” Oth­ers (myself includ­ed) sus­pect that this approach could enliv­en the human­i­ties, allow­ing schol­ars to focus on new meth­ods and ques­tions. How “big data” is trans­form­ing the human­i­ties (and the sci­ences too) is the sub­ject of six arti­cles appear­ing in The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion. Let me high­light them for you:

Hey Jude at The White House

Yes­ter­day, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma award­ed the Gersh­win Prize For Pop­u­lar Song to Sir Paul McCart­ney. (Watch it here). Then, the good part. McCart­ney took to the stage and per­formed the Bea­t­les clas­sic Michelle (the ref­er­ence is obvi­ous), Eleanor Rig­by, and Hey Jude, dur­ing which he was joined by Jack White, Ste­vie Won­der, Dave Grohl and oth­ers. You can watch a small clip of that per­for­mance above. PBS will air the com­plete per­for­mance on July 28.

Relat­ed: 13,500 Sing “Hey Jude” in Trafal­gar Square

via Fuse­blog

Traveling Denim: The Global Fade

A four minute film, fea­tur­ing an Amer­i­can pair of Levis trav­el­ing the globe for two years, all shot by a Japan­ese direc­tor Takayu­ki Akachi. Nice find by Ian in El Sal­vador or … is it now Brazil?

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.