Three cheers for curation. Limelight, an Australian culture web site, has selected “40 of the most informative, representative and entertaining videos” available on YouTube. And they’ve strung them together in such a way that they offer a “chronological history of western classical music from the twelfth century to the modern age,” taking you from The Middle Ages and The Renaissance, through the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, and ending with The Birth of Modernism and Post-WWII innovations. The clip above comes from Anton van Munster’s film on Vivaldi, I Musici, which is available on Netflix. (If you’re not a subscriber, a one month free trial is available here.) Other clips put a spotlight on Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner and others.
Jerry Seinfeld has decided to go on tour, and as if to remind us that his stand-up life preceded his decade-plus dominance of network TV, he’s also archived the best bits from a comedy career that now spans over 25 years. (He first appeared on national television in 1977.) The new site/archive will feature just a few clips, making new ones available each day. It’s a smart move; the steady trickle of new jokes will no doubt keep fans hungry.
For a reminder of the days when it was Seinfeld himself who was hungry, here’s a set from 1981, his first appearance on HBO. He’s being presented by the pitch-perfect Smothers Brothers, who introduce the barely known comedian as “Jerry Steinfeld.”
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls David Hume (1711–1776) “the most important philosopher ever to write in English,” and this week the philosophy world celebrates the 300th birthday of the great Scottish empiricist/skeptic. Around the web, you can find more serious commentary on Hume’s philosophy. Just head over to The Philosopher’s Zone,Philosophy Bites, or The Partially Examined Life to listen to their enlightening podcasts. And then you have this: Hume’s philosophy summed up in three slightly ribald minutes. It’s part of a series of YouTube clips that offer idiosyncratic summaries of the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, Descartes and other giants.
Meanwhile, let us note that you can download free versions of Hume’s major works online. Let us list a few for you:
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Audio — Text
Dialogues Concerning Natural ReligionAudio — Text
96 years ago today, Orson Welles, the “ultimate auteur,” was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Hence his early nickname, The Kenosha Kid. Nowadays, we remember Welles as arguably the greatest director of the 20th century, a superb actor on stage and screen, and a pioneering radio dramatist. To celebrate his 96th birthday, we have dipped into our archives and pulled together some of Welles’ finest artistic works, all now freely available online:
The Stranger
Welles’ third film, The Stranger, a 1946 film noir thriller, was a commercial success upon release. The same couldn’t be said for Citizen Kane. The Stranger features Edward G. Robinson hunting a Nazi fugitive (Welles himself) who marries the daughter (Loretta Young) of a Supreme Court justice. The film, now available online in its entirety, is one of the first post WWII films to show footage of concentration camps. You can find this film, and others mentioned below, in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Welles famously starred in The Third Man, a must-see noir film, which won the Grand Prix at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography in 1950. A half century later, the British Film Institute namedThe Third Man the best British film of the 20th century. Quite a statement. You can watch it here.
Freedom River
Almost 40 years (and seven presidential administrations) have passed since Orson Welles narrated Freedom River. And although the animation shows some age, the parable, a commentary on America, still resonates today. Or, at least I suspect many viewers will think so. You can get the backstory on this intriguing little project here.
The War of the Worlds
Back in the late 1930s, Orson Welles launched The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio program dedicated to bringing dramatic productions to the American airwaves. The show had a fairly short run. It lasted from 1938 to 1941. But it made its mark. During these few years, The Mercury Theatre aired The War of the Worlds, an episode narrated by Welles that led many Americans to believe their country was under Martian attack. The legendary production was based on H.G. Wells’ early sci-fi novel, and you can listen to it here. We have more links to Mercury Theatre productions here.
Welles Reads Moby Dick
He only gives you two tantalizing minutes. And he’s paraphrasing more than reading the text itself. But it’s vintage Welles. You can find him reading another passage from Melville’s classic here…
French graphic artist Martin Woutisseth has put together this lovely filmography of Stanley Kubrick, based on animated posters of his own design, and set to a wonderful score by composer Romain Trouillet. Woutisseth’s visual interpretations of each film, from Killer’s Kiss (1955) to Eyes Wide Shut (1999) are works of art in their own right. We especially loved the details on the mask for Eyes Wide Shut at minute 3:00.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
Sterling Johnson, otherwise known as the Bubblesmith, goes to work at Stinson Beach, a little north of San Francisco. Mark Day captures the artistic display with his Canon 550D, and it’s all set to Bach’s Prelude in C Major. Like the kid said in American Beauty, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in…”
A sad, loving farewell to the great playwright, librettist and director Arthur Laurents, who died in his sleep today at the age of 93. Mr. Laurents was best known for writing Gypsy (1959),The Way We Were(1973),and of course the incomparable West Side Story (1959), about which this author has nothing to say, except that without West Side Story the world as she knows and loves it would cease to exist.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
We have previously featured films by the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. So we’re overjoyed to report that the Moscow film company Mosfilm has just made 5o Russian classics available on YouTube in high definition. According to Yahoo News, Mosfilm has pledged to release five more films each week, all in HD with English subtitles, eventually bringing the total for the year to 200.
You can look over the whole list of currently available classics at Mosfilm’s YouTube channel. (Non-Russian speakers might want to hit Google Translate.) In yet another concession to the decadence of Western capitalism, each film is preceded by a short commercial. We hope some balance has been restored to the universe by the inclusion of communist dictator Joseph Stalin’s favorite movie, the musical comedy Volga Volga.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
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