Download a Free Course from “The Great Courses” Through Audible.com’s Free Trial Program

in Audio Books, Online Courses | July 10th, 2013

Hardly a day goes by where I’m not doing one of two things — listening to an audio book from Audible.com, or listening to a lecture from The Great Courses (formerly known as The Teaching Company). So, I was naturally pleased when the two companies announced a partnership yesterday. From now on, Audible subscribers can download courses/lectures from The Great Courses, and they’re pretty cheap. For example, members of Audible’s Gold plan can purchase a polished 36-hour course, such as How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, for roughly $15. Not bad, especially considering that it would cost exponentially more to buy it directly through the Great Courses’ web site. If you’ve never tried out Audible or The Great Courses, then you may want to sign up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial. It will let you download any one course for free. NB: Audible is an Amazon.com subsidiary, and we’re a member of their affiliate program.

If none of the above sounds any good, well, you could always lose yourself in our collections of 900 Free Audio Books and 1700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Learn to Code with Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science Course And Other Free Tech Classes

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150 Free Online Business Courses

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Grateful Dead’s “Ultimate Bootleg” Now Online & Added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry

in Music | July 10th, 2013

I have known many a Deadhead, and I’ve loved ‘em—friends and friends of friends; I’ve hung out in parking lots, at parties and campsites, and done what ‘Heads do in such gatherings. And yet, to paraphrase St. Paul, I was in the scene but not of it, never one of the faithful, just a hanger-on in a world that bemused me, listening to music whose intense appeal I didn’t quite get. Don’t get me wrong; I thought the first album was a country-rock classic. But that’s where my Dead knowledge ended. Of the two sixties bands who both once called themselves The Warlocks—The Dead and The Velvet Underground—my psychedelic tastes ran decidedly in the East Coast direction.

So I’m probably as far as it gets from an expert on the labyrinthine world of Grateful Dead bootlegs. But I have to admit, just like the parking lot scene the young, aloof me observed through the eyes of my old hippie friends, I’m intrigued and a little intimidated by the obsessive cataloguing of Deadhead fandom.

My teenage punk-rock self admired the DIY ethos, despite serious stylistic misgivings, and now as a grown-up who couldn’t care less about labels, I’m finding the time to go back and re-listen to some of those bootleg recordings. I’m catching up on the history of live Dead by reading Nick Paumgarten’s exhaustive “Deadhead: The Afterlife” article in The New Yorker, and luckily for me, and for the real fans too, the days of trading tapes are gone. Hundreds of hours of live concert audio now exist in the Internet Archive.

One of those concert recordings—the May 8, 1977 Barton Hall/Cornell University gig available above in its entirety—is said by some to be the “ultimate bootleg.” I’m in no position to judge, so I’ll quote the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, who write that this recording “has achieved almost mythic status among ‘Deadhead’ tape traders because of its excellent sound quality and early accessibility.” The LOC also points out that “fans of the Grateful Dead will never completely agree about which one of their over 2,300 concerts was the best.” Debates like this can, and should, go on forever. If they didn’t, whole subcultures would shrivel up and die. The armchair anthropologist in me thinks that would be a shame. The music fan (and inner hippie) in me is happy to groove to whatever catches my fancy these days, and I’m getting down to this one, for sure.

Note: You can find more information on the Barton Hall/Cornell concert here. And here you can find 13 essential bootlegs selected by Nick Paumgarten, complete with links to audio from the concerts.

Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead Rehearse Together in Summer 1987. Listen to 74 Tracks.

The Grateful Dead Rock the National Anthem at Candlestick Park: Opening Day, 1993

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Three Great Films Starring Charlie Chaplin, the True Icon of Silent Comedy

in Comedy, Film | July 10th, 2013

Writing about the sort of creators and works of art we do here at Open Culture, I constantly struggle not to overuse the word “iconic.” But in the case of actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, no other adjective could do. When we call Chaplin iconic, we mean it literally: not only did he find great success as a comic figure in the silent-film era, he visually represents the concept of a comic figure in the silent film era. Yet he didn’t attain icon status in just one form, having continually tweaked, refined, and improved his look and sensibility throughout his 75-year career. Now, 35 years after his death, we see all of these performances as subtly different but still recognize them as expressions of the broader Chaplin persona. At the top of the post, you can watch the film that established his most beloved one, 1915’s The Tramp.

But the Little Tramp didn’t emerge fully formed just then and there. Technically, the character debuted in the previous year’s Kid Auto Races at Venice, and even before that, Chaplin portrayed a few fellows we might call proto-Tramps. Just above, you’ll find 1914’s Making a Living, a picture that casts the London-born Chaplin, with hat, cane, and mustache, as flirtatious thief Henry English. His criminal ways lead him into the path of those other silent-comedy stalwarts (if not quite icons), the Keystone Kops. A decade later, Chaplin, by that point the quintessential writing-directing-acting auteur, wouldn’t need to share the screen. In 1925, he made the Klondike-set The Gold Rush, whose “streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness” drew special praise from the New York Times, and for which Chaplin said he wanted to be remembered. You can watch it below, and then you can browse our collection of 25 Free Charlie Chaplin Films on the web.

Hollywood, Epic Documentary Chronicles the Early History of Cinema

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

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

in History | July 10th, 2013

Last week, we revisited some Cold War propaganda that taught upstanding American citizens How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism. It’s a gem, but it has nothing on the 1954 film, The House in the Middle. Selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by The Library of Congress, the short documentary makes the ultimate case for cleanliness. Bringing viewers to the Nevada Proving Grounds, the 12-minute film shows what happens when clean, white houses are subjected to heat waves from an atomic blast, versus what happens when a dingy, ill-kept house goes through the same drill. It turns out that neat people can not only claim moral victory (as they always do). They also get to live another day. Consider it proof of the survival of the tidiest.

The film was produced by the National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau with support from the Federal Civil Defense Administration. The National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association also apparently played a role, suggesting that corporate interests were capitalizing on wartime fear. Not the first time that’s happened in America. Or that last…

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Duck and Cover, or: How I Learned to Elude the Bomb

Hiroshima After the Atomic Bomb in 360 Degrees

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New Robert Rauschenberg Digital Collection Lets You Download Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

in Art | July 10th, 2013

After the waning of abstract expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg’s exuberant prints, paintings, sculptures, and three-dimensional collages he called “Combines” rejuvenated the New York art world and helped bring pop art to prominence, anticipating Warhol’s experiments. And now students of twentieth-century American art can connect with all of the artist’s work in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection without setting foot in the Bay area, thanks to SFMOMA’s Rauschenberg Research Project, which allows users to download high res images of the museum’s Rauschenbergs. Research materials—including commentary, interviews, essays, and more—accompany each image. Clicking on the main link for each image will send you to a page with a lengthy description. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find individual links for each of the associated files and an omnibus link for all of them at once.

It’s certainly not a substitute for seeing the work up close in all its ontological materiality, but it’s still quite a wonderful resource for researchers, art historians, and even general enthusiasts of Rauschenberg, particularly since many of the works in SFMOMA’s database are not currently on display (and the museum is temporarily closed during an expansion). A painting you can’t see in person is the dense collage Mother of God (at top), one of Rauschenberg’s earliest surviving paintings from a period in the 50s when the artist explored several religious themes. The painting’s brown background is composed of layers of maps of American locales, and the site allows you to zoom in and examine each one in fine detail. In the video above—one of the digital project’s collection of artifacts—see Rauschenberg discuss the painting with curator Walter Hopps and SFMOMA Director David A. Ross in a 1999 interview.

via Metafilter

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Alfred Hitchcock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuffin’

in Animation, Film | July 9th, 2013

Alfred Hitchcock liked to call it the “MacGuffin” — the mysterious object in a spy thriller that sets the whole chain of events into motion.

But despite the supposed centrality of the MacGuffin, a Hitchcock movie is always about something else. In The 39 Steps, for example, the MacGuffin turns out to be the coveted plans for an advanced airplane engine, stored in the mind of a vaudeville performer named “Mr. Memory.” But really the film is about a wrongfully accused man’s desperate struggle to solve a mystery so he can clear his name and live to see another day.

The MacGuffin is always particular — often to the point of absurdity — while the hero’s motivation is universal. Some of the characters may care about the MacGuffin, but the audience certainly does not. In his 1962 interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock explains:

The main thing I’ve learned over the years is that the MacGuffin is nothing. I’m convinced of this, but I find it very difficult to prove it to others. My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, “What does he do?” The counterintelligence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.” “But what does he sell?” “Oh, just government secrets!” is the answer. Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

The term “MacGuffin” was coined by a screenwriter Hitchcock worked with named Angus MacPhail, according to Donald Spoto in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. But the principle goes back at least as far as Rudyard Kipling, as Hitchcock explains in this whimsical little film by Isaac Niemand with audio from Hitchcock’s June 8, 1972 appearance on the Dick Cavett Show. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about the MacGuffin is that it contains the word “guff,” which means a load of nonsense. “There’s a lot to look for in Hitchcock’s films,” writes Spoto, “but watch out for the MacGuffin. It will lead you nowhere.”

NOTE: The 39 Steps and other Hitchcock thrillers can be found in our collection of 16 Free Hitchcock Movies Online, not to mention our big collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Hitchcock’s Seven-Minute Editing Master Class

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Four American Composers: Peter Greenaway on John Cage, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Robert Ashley (1983)

in Film, Music, Television | July 9th, 2013

Why would a noted British filmmaker want to take as a subject four American composers? Perhaps the question answers itself, in part, when I tell you the identity of the filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, and the composers, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, John Cage, and Robert Ashley. No wonder this selection of musical personalities appealed to the director of The Draughtsman’s Contract;The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; and Prospero’s Books, whom critics have labeled, at various times, a classicist, an experimenter, a formalist, and a weirdo. Alas, Greenaway’s fans may not know much about Glass, Monk, Cage, and Ashley, just as those composers’ adherents may never have encountered a movie of Greenaway’s. To bridge the gap, we give you the documentary series Four American Composers, free to watch online. At the top of this post, you’ll find the first episode, on Cage. The second, below, covers Glass. The third and fourth take on Monk and Ashley, respectively.

Greenaway die-hards such as myself may, watching these documentaries the filmmaker created in 1983, think back to his early career. At that time, he made pictures like The Falls, which rigidly followed the documentary form while completely abandoning its aspirations to capture the literal truth. Thoroughly nonfictional, or at least seeming that way, the documentaries that make up Four American Composers nonetheless exude the Greenaway sensibility. “Because he made mostly mock-documentaries in the seventies,” writes Amy Lawrence in The Films of Peter Greenaway, “the ‘real’ documentaries are nearly indistinguishable from the fakes. Real people (especially John Cage) tend to become Greenaway characters.” The project thus slides neatly in with his other, more “straightforward” films, all of which take place in a deliberately structured labyrinth of joke and allusion peopled by architects, inventors, aristocrats, and artists — obsessives, all.

You can find two other films by Greenaway — Darwin and Rembrandt’s J’accuse — in our collection of 525 Free Movies Online.

Peter Greenaway Looks at the Day Cinema Died — and What Comes Next

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Listening to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, (Maybe) the Longest Audio Book Ever Made

in Audio Books, Literature | July 9th, 2013

I’m impressed by the undertaking. Neville Jason and Naxos Audio Books have completed an unabridged audio version of Proust’s epic, seven-part novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Proust published the first volume, Swann’s Way, one hundred years ago, in 1913, and completed the last volume, Time Regained, fourteen years later, in 1927. By that time, Proust had a masterpiece on his hands — a very long masterpiece. The classic (available in our collection of Free eBooks) spans some 3,000 pages and contains more than 1.5 million words. Until now, Remembrance of Things Past has never been available in an unabridged audio format, perhaps because it would amount to the longest audio book ever made (or something approaching that). But Neville Jason has pulled it off, producing a 151-hour recording that’s now available on Audible.com. Below, we’ve provided seven free audio excerpts (one from each volume), and if you care to sign up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial, you can download any one volume for free. NB: Audible is an Amazon.com subsidiary, and we’re a member of their affiliate program. If Proust isn’t your cup of tea, you can find many other great works in our collection of 630 Free Audio Books.

Swann’s Way