Behold Charles Laughton Delivering the Gettysburg Address in its Entirety in Ruggles of Red Gap

in Comedy, Film, History, Video - Arts & Culture | October 13th, 2012

The Get­tys­burg Address is the sort of elo­quent speech school­child­ren were once expect­ed to com­mit to mem­o­ry, much as they were required to bring apples for the teacher and dip each oth­ers’ pig­tails in ink. Nowa­days, with ever more his­tor­i­cal ground clam­or­ing to be cov­ered, it’s real­ly only those cel­e­brat­ed open­ing lines that tend to stick. No doubt they’ll show up in the Stephen Spiel­berg-direct­ed Lin­coln bio-pic slat­ed to open lat­er this fall.

Stray back in time for a real refresh­er course, cour­tesy of erst­while Hunch­back of Notre Dame and Shake­speare­an wun­derkind, Charles Laughton. His soup-to-nuts recita­tion of the cel­e­brat­ed speech is the unex­pect­ed high­light of Rug­gles of Red Gap, a 1935 screw­ball West­ern that time has rel­e­gat­ed to the semi-shad­ows. It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly under­stat­ed per­for­mance that man­ages to illu­mi­nate the mean­ing of each and every word. (It also makes me more for­giv­ing of the film’s ear­ly min­utes, when Laughton’s por­tray­al of a very prop­er Eng­lish but­ler suc­cumbs to a sil­ver-can­de­labra-up-the-hein­er lev­el of broad­ness.)

Just as impres­sive is direc­tor Leo McCarey’s deci­sion to set the scene atop a gid­dy vaude­ville rou­tine fea­tur­ing a saloon full of clue­less cow­boys and bar­keeps. It’s a ton of fun.

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Ishu Patel’s Oscar-Nominated, Animated Films Reveal a Singular, Handcrafted Vision

in Animation, Film | October 12th, 2012

I’m hap­py to date myself and say this: in the days before com­put­er graph­ics, when ani­ma­tors worked painstak­ing­ly by hand (yes, I know, com­put­er ren­der­ing is painstak­ing), ani­mat­ed films just seemed… I don’t know, pret­ti­er, more impres­sive­ly art­ful. I’ll take the heat for say­ing so and give you two short films as evi­dence, both from inno­v­a­tive ani­ma­tor Ishu Patel. Orig­i­nal­ly from Gujarat, India, Patel has made only a hand­ful of short films in his twen­ty-five year career, most of them for the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da. But six of those films won top hon­ors at inter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­vals and two—Par­adise and The Bead Game—were nom­i­nat­ed for Acad­e­my Awards.

Par­adise (above), made in 1984, uses hand-drawn designs and so-called “under-the-cam­era” ani­ma­tion tech­niques such as cut-out, back-lit plas­ticine, sand, and paint­ed glass to ren­der an exot­ic and shim­mer­ing world. Each frame is a work of art on its own; in fact, Patel includes stills from the films on his site, some show­ing pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es. Much of Par­adise takes place inside a palace that resem­bles an intri­cate chalk draw­ing. There, a lone monarch watch­es as a flam­boy­ant bird (of par­adise?) trans­forms itself into a daz­zling suc­ces­sion of col­or­ful forms. Out­side, in a land­scape right out of Hen­ri Rousseau, a soli­tary black bird lurks, attempt­ing to rival the oth­er bird’s beau­ty, with lit­tle suc­cess. The orig­i­nal score by Ghe­o­rghe Zam­fir (yes, Zam­fir, of the pan flute fame) con­jures Ennio Mor­ri­cone.

In 1977’s The Bead Game (below), Patel’s first ani­mat­ed film, the set­ting is much sparser—a sol­id black back­ground and a spare, per­cus­sive sound­track by J.P. Ghosh. But the activ­i­ty is unre­lent­ing as a col­lec­tion of beads evolve from sin­gle cells, to epithe­lial folds, to a series of crea­tures, each one devour­ing the pre­vi­ous until humans arrive. Once we do, we devel­op pro­gres­sive­ly more destruc­tive ways to kill each oth­er. The finale is a psy­che­del­ic tour-de-force. One can only imag­ine the amount of time and care that went into stop-motion ani­mat­ing these hun­dreds of beads. The effect is sim­ply stun­ning and results in a sin­gu­lar vision one rarely sees in CGI-only work. Again, I’ll take the heat, but I stand by it: ani­ma­tion by hand pro­duced work that no com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed image has yet rivaled.

Patel’s films will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our list of 500 Free Online Movies.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Learn New Languages (From Arabic to Yiddish) with 150+ Free Podcasts

in Language Lessons, Podcasts | October 12th, 2012

I spend a great deal of time vis­it­ing unfa­mil­iar cities, spend­ing days walk­ing, cycling, or rid­ing trains and bus­es through them. Some­times the peo­ple of these cities speak lan­guages I know; some­times they speak lan­guages I don’t. Either way, dur­ing all these hours in motion, my per­son­al sound­track comes from an iPod loaded with lan­guage-learn­ing pod­casts. If you’d like to engage in this delight­ful­ly men­tal­ly stim­u­lat­ing prac­tice your­self — and I high­ly rec­om­mend it — you can get start­ed by brows­ing Open Cul­ture’s col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons avail­able online. The list cov­ers no few­er than 40 tongues, and many of the lessons come in pod­cast form. Should you find your­self in need of shows offer­ing Bul­gar­i­an sur­vival phras­es, instruc­tion in Swedish expres­sions and cul­ture, or Pol­ish in one minute a day, here is the list you want. From my efforts in study­ing Span­ish, Kore­an, and Japan­ese, I can per­son­al­ly (and strong­ly) rec­om­mend sev­er­al of its offer­ings.

Cof­fee Break Span­ish and the more advanced Show Time Span­ish, both pro­duced by the Radio Lin­gua net­work (out of Scot­land, of all places) start you off from an absolute zero of pre­sumed knowl­edge and pro­ceeds to get you up to “cruis­ing alti­tude,” which I call the point in lan­guage acqui­si­tion at which you become able to learn from real, untrans­lat­ed speech. You might then con­sid­er down­load­ing a show like Notes in Span­ish, and espe­cial­ly the con­ver­sa­tion­al­ly focused Notes in Span­ish Gold. For Japan­ese, few lan­guage pod­casts cater to a wider vari­ety of pro­fi­cien­cy lev­els at once than does JapanesePod101, which I sup­ple­ment with Japan­ese nation­al broad­cast­er NHK’s lessons (which also come taught in quite a few lan­guages besides Eng­lish.) And for Kore­an, the lan­guage that first cul­ti­vat­ed in me this whole intel­lec­tu­al­ly and social­ly thrilling learn­ing addic­tion, you can do no bet­ter than Hyun­woo Sun’s Talk to Me in Kore­an, quite pos­si­bly the most thor­ough, fre­quent, slick, and enter­tain­ing lan­guage-instruc­tion pod­cast of any kind. Lis­ten­ing to these shows has con­vinced me that every moment spent not acquir­ing a new lan­guage is a moment wast­ed. But even if you don’t believe any­thing that extreme, it’s still a lot of fun. And doing it through these free pod­casts, you cer­tain­ly can’t argue with the price.

Here’s our col­lec­tion once again: Learn 40 Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

375 Free eBooks: Down­load to Kin­dle, iPad/iPhone & Nook

450 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

530 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

500 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Stephen Fry Friday: His Musings on Life, Swearing, Shakespeare, Nanoscience & More

in Books, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Science | October 12th, 2012

Stephen Fry is a man of many tal­ents. He’s a nov­el­ist, con­trib­u­tor to news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, TV per­son­al­i­ty, come­di­an, pod­cast­er, lin­guist of sorts. And accord­ing to his Twit­ter pro­file, he’s also a “Lord of Dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blog­ger.” In short, Stephen Fry cov­ers a lot of ground, and, through­out the years, we’ve shown you Fry opin­ing on many sub­jects. But you can’t real­ly appre­ci­ate his intel­lec­tu­al range until you’ve seen his mus­ings placed next to one anoth­er. So we’re pro­claim­ing today “Stephen Fry Fri­day” and we’re pre­sent­ing our favorite Fry clips from years past. We start above with Fry’s take on “The Joys of Swear­ing” and the rest fol­lows:

The Strange New World of Nanoscience

What is nano? And how will nanoscience shape our future? It’s all explained in a snap­py 17 minute video —  NANO YOU — that Fry nar­rat­ed for Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18 

It’s a peren­ni­al fan favorite — Fry reflect­ing on his life, all 55 years of it, and offer­ing up life lessons to young­sters. Truth be told, old­er folks will get some­thing out of this video too.

On Phi­los­o­phy and the Impor­tance of Unbe­lief

Get­ting into the nit­ty grit­ty of phi­los­o­phy, Fry gives us one more life les­son: If you assume there’s no after­life, you’ll like­ly have a fuller, more enrich­ing life.

A Kinet­ic Take on Lan­guage

For a brief time in 2008, Fry pro­duced a series of pod­casts – called “Pod­grams” – that drew on his writ­ings, speech­es and col­lec­tive thoughts. In one episode, he med­i­tat­ed on lan­guage — the Eng­lish lan­guage, his own lan­guage, Barthes, Chom­sky, and Pinker — and then Matthew Rogers took that med­i­ta­tion and ran with it, pro­duc­ing a “kinet­ic typog­ra­phy ani­ma­tion” that art­ful­ly illus­trates a six minute seg­ment of Fry’s longer talk.

Shake­speare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

It’s not sur­pris­ing that some­one this immersed in lan­guage would deeply admire the Shake­speare­an tra­di­tion.…

Why Fry Loves Joyce’s Ulysses

And Joyce’s Ulysses too (which you can down­load as a fine free audio book here).

Stay tuned, we’ll have more Stephen Fry in the months and years to come.…

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Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beatnik Film Stars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Shot by Robert Frank

in Film, Poetry | October 11th, 2012

Sure, you could expe­ri­ence the Beat sen­si­bil­i­ty on film by watch­ing The Beat Gen­er­a­tion. But why set­tle for that high-gloss Metro-Gold­wyn-May­er fea­ture treat­ment when you can get an unadul­ter­at­ed half-hour chunk of the real thing above, in Pull My Daisy? Both films came out in 1959, but only the lat­ter comes from the lens of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Frank, he of the famous pho­to­book The Amer­i­cans. And only the lat­ter fea­tures the uncon­ven­tion­al per­form­ing tal­ents of Allen Gins­berg, David Amram, Del­phine Seyrig, and Jack Ker­ouac. That Ker­ouac him­self pro­vides all the nar­ra­tion assures us we’re watch­ing a movie ful­ly com­mit­ted to the Beat mind­set. “Ear­ly morn­ing in the uni­verse,” he says to set the open­ing scene. “The wife is get­tin’ up, openin’ up the win­dows, in this loft that’s in the Bow­ery of the Low­er East Side of New York. She’s a painter, and her hus­band’s a rail­road brake­man, and he’s comin’ home in a cou­ple hours, about five hours, from the local.”

Ker­ouac’s ambling words seem at first like one impro­vi­sa­tion­al ele­ment of many. In fact, they pro­vid­ed the pro­duc­tion’s only ele­ment of impro­vi­sa­tion: Frank and com­pa­ny took pains to light, shoot, script, and rehearse with great delib­er­ate­ness, albeit the kind of delib­er­ate­ness meant to cre­ate the impres­sion of thrown-togeth­er, ram­shackle spon­tane­ity. But if the kind of care­ful craft that made Pull My Daisy seems not to fit with­in the anar­chic sub­cul­tur­al col­lec­tive per­sona of the Beats, sure­ly the premis­es of its sto­ry and the con­se­quences there­of do. The afore­men­tioned brake­man brings a bish­op home for din­ner, but his exu­ber­ant­ly low-liv­ing bud­dies decide they want in on the fun. Or if there’s no fun to be had, then, in keep­ing with what we might iden­ti­fy as Beat prin­ci­ples, they’ll cre­ate some of their own. Or at least they’ll cre­ate a dis­tur­bance, and where could a Beat pos­si­bly draw the line between dis­tur­bance and fun?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan and Allen Gins­berg Vis­it the Grave of Jack Ker­ouac (1979)

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cov­er for On the Road (And More Great Cul­ture from Around the Web)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Codecademy’s Free Courses Democratize Computer Programming

in Computer Science, Education, Online Courses, Technology, Web/Tech | October 11th, 2012

There are good and bad online instruc­tion­al plat­forms for every­thing: some lan­guage cours­es work bet­ter than oth­ers and some approach­es to teach­ing music are more effec­tive than oth­ers.

This is just as true for com­put­er pro­gram­ming, where, like every­thing else, an abun­dance of free cours­es and tuto­ri­als from MIT, UC Berke­ley, Har­vard and Stan­ford offer inter­ac­tive tools for learn­ing web devel­op­ment and com­put­er pro­gram­ming. You can find a long list of free comp sci cours­es from these great uni­ver­si­ties here.

One new site that is get­ting par­tic­u­lar­ly good reviews is Codecad­e­my, a free online learn­ing sys­tem for learn­ing every­thing from HTML Basics  to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tuto­ri­als to design projects of their own choos­ing. It’s also easy to track your progress.

What sets Codecad­e­my apart from oth­er pro­gram­ming tuto­ri­als is that all stu­dent work can be com­plet­ed with­in a web brows­er. No soft­ware down­load­ing or installing is required. Respond­ing to crit­i­cism that the site did­n’t ini­tial­ly offer enough cours­es, Codecad­e­my has added numer­ous cours­es in 2012 and launched a Course Cre­ator pro­gram. This is a boon for users inter­est­ed in learn­ing how to teach. Codecad­e­my does not put user-cre­at­ed cours­es through an approval process and gives course cre­ators a link that they can dis­trib­ute as they wish. Codecad­e­my does, how­ev­er, screen the cours­es and selects which to fea­ture on its own site.

Enrollees in its Code Year pro­gram receive a pro­gram­ming les­son in their email inbox every Mon­day, start­ing with the fun­da­men­tals of JavaScript and then mov­ing on to HTML and CSS. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple signed up at the begin­ning of the year (includ­ing the White House and New York May­or Michael Bloomberg). If you were one the enrollees, it’s still not too late to keep that New Year’s res­o­lu­tion.

Find Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. Find more of her work at .

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Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Reunite in Exotic Marrakesh, 1994

in Music | October 11th, 2012

Wah Wah:

In 1994 Jim­my Page and Robert Plant col­lab­o­rat­ed on a new musi­cal project for the first time since the death 14 years ear­li­er of Led Zep­pelin’s drum­mer, John Bon­ham. The reunion result­ed from an invi­ta­tion to appear on MTV’s hit series Unplugged. But Page and Plant want­ed to steer clear of nos­tal­gia, so they exclud­ed for­mer Zep­pelin bassist John Paul Jones from the project and named it Unled­ded.

The result­ing album and DVD fea­ture an assort­ment of Zep­pelin songs that were rein­ter­pret­ed with the help of an Egypt­ian ensem­ble, an Indi­an vocal­ist and the Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Orches­tra, but per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of the project was a trio of new songs record­ed with local musi­cians in Mar­rakesh, Moroc­co. Those per­for­mances, shown here, were the result of a col­lab­o­ra­tion with tra­di­tion­al musi­cians of the Gnawa minor­i­ty, whose sub-Saha­ran ances­tors were brought to Moroc­co many cen­turies ago as slaves.

“We’d nev­er met the Gnawa when we went there,” said Plant in a 1994 inter­view, “but they were very patient, and smil­ing is a great cur­ren­cy.” Gnawa music is tra­di­tion­al­ly per­formed for prayer and heal­ing, and dif­fers from oth­er North African music. “They play a kind of music which is much more akin to the music of the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta than it is to do with Arab music,” Plant said in anoth­er inter­view. “It’s haunt­ing, seduc­tive, and quite allur­ing.”

City Don’t Cry:

The Truth Explodes (Yal­lah):

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of ‘Kash­mir’

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Comedian Tig Notaro’s “Truly Great” Cancer Stand-up Set Now Available on Louis C.K.‘s Website

in Comedy, Life | October 11th, 2012

Until a cou­ple months ago, it was kind of an open secret that Tig Notaro is one of the smartest, fun­ni­est female comics work­ing today. Notaro had a fierce­ly loy­al fan­base, a No. 1 pod­cast with writ­ing part­ner Kyle Dun­ni­gan (Pro­fes­sor Blastoff) and made reg­u­lar appear­ances on some of the usu­al com­e­dy cir­cuits, live and tele­vised (Com­e­dy Cen­tral Presents, The Sarah Sil­ver­man Pro­gram). She was doing pret­ty well, but had nowhere near the pro­file of, say, Louis C.K. Then some­thing extra­or­di­nary hap­pened. First, her life fell apart, and then her career blast­ed off: What changed? She got can­cer. Just the lat­est twist, a brush with death, in the life of a “mas­ter of the art of coun­ter­in­tu­itive com­e­dy.”

The can­cer, of course, was bad. But the four months lead­ing up to her diag­no­sis includ­ed a series of improb­a­bly awful events that could send the aver­age per­son into a depres­sive coma: she con­tract­ed pneu­mo­nia, then a near-fatal bac­te­r­i­al infec­tion, then her moth­er died sud­den­ly, then she went through an emo­tion­al breakup. All fol­lowed by… can­cer. So what’s the upside? Well, she is can­cer free now and appar­ent­ly doing well after a dou­ble mas­tec­to­my. But what made an impact pro­fes­sion­al­ly was the way she han­dled the com­pound­ing of per­son­al crises: she kept show­ing up, mak­ing great com­e­dy. And last August, instead of can­cel­ing an appear­ance at the L.A. club Largo, Notaro went onstage on the day she was diag­nosed with stage 2 breast can­cer, and deliv­ered a poignant, dead­pan mono­logue: “Hel­lo, I have can­cer. How are you?”

Louis C.K., who was there that night, tweet­ed that Notaro’s act was among the “tru­ly great, mas­ter­ful standup sets” he had seen in his 27 years in the busi­ness. Lat­er on his web­site C.K. wrote:

I was cry­ing and laugh­ing and lis­ten­ing like nev­er in my life. Here was this small woman stand­ing alone against death and sim­ply report­ing where her mind had been and what had hap­pened and employ­ing her gor­geous­ly acute stand-up voice to her own death.

C.K.’s noto­ri­ety sent Notaro trend­ing all over the inter­net, but the per­for­mance wasn’t made pub­lic, which only increased inter­est. Now, the uncut record­ing of that night has been released as her sec­ond com­e­dy album, Live, and it’s avail­able on C.K.’s web­site for the small price of $5.00. You can hear a short pre­view of the set above.

These days, Notaro’s first album Good One is No. 2 (in com­e­dy) on iTunes, she has a book deal, and is begin­ning a reg­u­lar gig on Com­e­dy Cen­tral. Reporters come call­ing fre­quent­ly. Notaro spoke to NPR’s Fresh Air a cou­ple days ago and told her sto­ry of that night. C.K. fol­lowed up in the same pro­gram with his ver­sion of events. Notaro’s inter­view is clas­sic her—she’s a nat­u­ral­ly gift­ed sto­ry­teller who seems to rise above mis­for­tune with envi­able poise and wit.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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