53 New York Times Videos Teach Essential Cooking Techniques: From Poaching Eggs to Shucking Oysters

in Food & Drink, How to Learn for Free | November 7th, 2014

I was blessed to grow up around a grandmother who cooked every meal like she was feeding a dozen famished farmhands. She never spelled out all her various tricks and short cuts … let’s not call them hacks. She just did what she did, and I picked it up by osmosis, using a juice glass for a biscuit cutter and watching for pockmarks in the pancake batter. Endless hours in her kitchen made me a confident chef long before I was in a position to buy my own groceries.

Not everyone is so fortunate, I know.

They get their information from Julia Child, Martha Stewart, some pseudonymous food blogger or possibly my friend, Jesse, whose expertise as a builder extends to things culinary. He once insisted on showing me a more efficient way to cut up mango. My grandmother’s tropical fruit experience maxed out at oranges, so I was on my own in the separating mango flesh from mango bone department. I tried it his way a couple of times, before reverting to my non-way.

There’s undeniable competitiveness amongst those of us who pride ourselves on our cooking abilities. Our skills are our honor. So help me if I went on Top Chef, and some guest judge decreed I was doing something wrong!

For the record, The New York Times endorses Jesse’s mango technique above, in their short instructional video series, Cooking Techniques. There are 53 videos in total.

I can see how such a collection would come in handy for those who didn’t grow up around my grandmother, Jesse, or me.

And speaking of handy, all fledgling chefs are advised to get a firm handle on knife techniques before picking up a notoriously slippery-fleshed fruit and cutting toward their own fingers! Such recklessness would never have passed muster with the editors of the Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls Cookbook. The Times is living on the edge!

Some of the content has a dopey wash-rinse-repeat vibe, abetted by an oddly flavorless narrative voice. (Not everyone has Thug Kitchen’s narrative sparkle. I should be grateful for the personality shining through other Times videos, notably Bill Cunningham’s “On The Street.”)

I’ll eat those words should I ever need to shuck an oyster, another one of those culinary duties that had no place on my Midwestern grandmother’s agenda. Not to say that my kitchen abilities are limned by the culinary standards of 1970s Indiana. I fling around fish sauce and coconuts with Siamese abandon, but oysters always seem so damn daunting. Could owe to early readings of Lewis Carroll.

I don’t know what I was so afraid of. Apparently all it takes is 30 seconds and a dishtowel. (And an oyster knife, but we’ve got drawerfuls of those, the trickle down effect of my husband’s Cape Cod boyhood.)

Ultimately, it’s solid stuff, but though with apologies to our vegetarian readers, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. You can poach eggs a la the Times, or do it my way by adding a tablespoon of vinegar to the poaching water. No fussy pre-poach. Boom! Done!

Similarly stemming greens. My way, gleaned, not from my gran, but a handwritten, illustrated zine earlier this millennium, doesn’t even require a knife! Hold that kale stem side up, using your other hand as an ersatz prong, tearing the leaf from stem to stern.

Good heavens. Is that where that expression came from? Perhaps someone at the Times would know…. See all 53 of their cooking technique videos here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, former food blogger and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Ricky Gervais Creates Outlandish Comedy with David Bowie

in Comedy, Music | November 7th, 2014

Ricky Gervais’s first brush with fame, at least on the other side of the pond, was as the front man of the ‘80s synch pop band Seona Dancing. If you watch the music video below of the band’s near-hit “Bitter Heart” from 1983, you can see a skinnier, svelter Gervais with over-moussed hair crooning like he was David Bowie. He indeed does sounds a bit like Bowie. He moves like Bowie. And if you squint your eyes, you can almost convince yourself that Gervais even looks like Bowie (or the lead singer of A‑ha).

Seona Dancing folded in 1984 because they ultimately failed to crack the Top 40. So after drifting around the music industry, Gervais turned to comedy. But that didn’t mean that he forgot about Bowie. Before he struck fame and fortune with The Office, he made a one-off show called Golden Years in 1998. He played Clive Meadows, an oblivious, Bowie-obsessed corporate middle manager who prepares for an appearance on the British talent series Stars In Their Eyes by dressing up as the rock star during his Aladdin Sane period, complete with satin pants, red wig and lightning bolt face paint.

Not long after The Office premiered, Gervais got a chance to meet his idol when the BBC invited him to a concert. “David Bowie has been a hero of mine for 25 years,” he told the Daily Mirror. “He is quite special and you meet him and you think he is going to come out of some weird tube and say ‘hello, I’m a space boy’. But he doesn’t, he says ‘hello I’m David’.” Of course, when Gervais was introduced, Bowie had no idea who he was.

Then a few weeks later, Gervais received an email from Bowie, who clearly caught up on his TV viewing. “So I watched that Office. I laughed. What do I do now?”

That sparked a friendship between the two. As Gervais recounted in an interview in GQ Magazine:

I remember, I think, the first time that I knew him when it was his birthday, I sent him an e‑mail that said “57???? Isn’t it about time that you got a proper job? Ricky Gervais, 42, comedian.” He sent back: “I have a proper job. David Bowie, 57, Rock God.”

Their relationship culminated in a guest appearance on Gervais’s HBO series Extras. In the episode, which you can watch above, Gervais plays Andy Millman, an oblivious, desperate movie extra looking to break into the big time. When he annoys Bowie, playing himself, at a posh bar with his self-absorbed whining, the rock star turns to a piano and starts to toss off a damning, but catchy, little ditty on the spot about Gervais called “Little Fat Man.” (Lyrics include: ““Pathetic little fat man / No one’s bloody laughing / The clown that no one laughs at / They all just wish he’d die”)

While making the episode, he and Bowie worked together on making the song:

“Have you got the lyrics?” and he went, “Yeah.” I said, “Can you do something quite retro, like ‘Life on Mars’?” And he went [deadpan], “Oh, of course, yeah, sure. I’ll knock off a quick ‘Life on Mars,’ shall I?”

via Network Awesome

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Simone de Beauvoir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and a Feminist (1960)

in Gender, Philosophy, Radio | November 7th, 2014

Before Ira Glass, before Terry Gross, before any number of NPR personalities and internet podcasters who these days bring us interview after fascinating interview with the great minds of our time, there was Studs Terkel. In addition to his almost superhuman achievements as an oral historian, film and TV actor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Terkel pioneered the radio interview with his Chicago radio show, which ran for over four decades. “With no written questions,” an NPR eulogy tells us, Terkel would “pick up a riff and improvise.” In 1960, he brought his jazz-like improvisational style to Paris, to the apartment of existentialist philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir.

You can hear their conversation, which spans nearly half-an-hour, just below. De Beauvoir talks about her middle-class upbringing, student days at the Sorbonne, and development as a teacher and writer. She narrates her life history in part because the first book of her three-volume autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, had just been published, and the second, The Prime of Life, was near completion. Already well-known for her philosophical and political work with her partner Jean-Paul Sartre and fellow existentialists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus, and her groundbreaking feminist study The Second Sex, de Beauvoir was entering a later phase in her career, a very reflective one. Suitably, Terkel opens the interview by observing that “listeners would very much like to know how you got this way.”

“This way” refers to de Beauvoir’s fierce commitments to philosophy, and to feminism. Terkel compares her to transcendentalist and feminist pioneer Margaret Fuller, “of Boston, a century ago,” who “too traveled to various parts of the world and saw what she wanted to see, what she intended to see, the truth.” Accordingly, their conversation turns from personal reminisces to de Beauvoir’s belief that the writer must be “involved,” or—as she clarifies, “committed”—ethically, philosophically, and politically. What this means for her is “not ignoring the rest of the world.” As she puts it, “there is no possible neutrality… you have to commit yourself… and not to just be picked by people, pretending you are picked by nobody.” She goes on, in a vein reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s remark that one “can’t be neutral on a moving train”:

You are always picked one way or another way. You always help this one or this other: the poor against the wealthy or the wealthy against the poor—you have no choice. And if you pretend just to stay and do nothing, even staying and doing nothing means something and it goes to one of the camp or the other.

Intrigued, Terkel asks “I’m doing nothing, this too is a matter of choice, you say?” De Beauvoir explains: “there is only one thing: is to begin to speak yourself, your own way. You have to say ‘I am against it,’ ‘I am for it’ because if you say nothing, your silence is used by the one you are for or against.” It’s a fascinating interview first because de Beauvoir is such an engaging speaker and secondly because Terkel is such an excellent listener.

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

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Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Playing Goalie: “What I Know Most Surely about Morality and Obligations, I Owe to Football”

in Philosophy, Sports | November 7th, 2014

Albert Camus, born 101 years ago today, once said, “After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

He was referring to his college days when he played goalie for the Racing Universitaire Algerios (RUA) junior team. Camus was a decent player, though not the great player that legend later made him out to be. For Jim White, author of A Matter of Life and Death: A History of Football in 100 Quotations, soccer perhaps taught Camus a few things about selflessness, cooperation, bravery and resilience. That’s a sunny way of looking at things. But perhaps The Telegraph gets at the deeper, darker life lessons Camus took away from soccer:

[T]here is something appropriate about a philosopher like Camus stationing himself between the sticks [that is, in goal]. It is a lonely calling, an individual isolated within a team ethic, one who plays to different constraints. If his team scores, the keeper knows it is nothing to do with him. If the opposition score, however, it is all his fault. Standing sentinel in goal, Camus had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdist nature of his position.

And perhaps the absurdist nature of life itself…

Camus — who appears in the picture above, wearing the dark color jersey in the front row — contracted tuberculosis when he was only 18 years old. His lungs too damaged to continue playing sports, the young man turned to philosophy. When Camus moved from Algeria to France, he learned that philosophy was a rough and tumble game too — something his soccer days prepared him for. He once quipped, “I learned … that a ball never arrives from the direction you expected it. That helped me in later life, especially in mainland France, where nobody plays straight.”

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Hear The Clash’s Vanilla Tapes, Demos of Nearly Every Song From London Calling

in Music | November 6th, 2014

Every creative work begins with a draft—or two, or three, or four. Great American novel, iconic painting, generation-defining poem, album of the decade… each represents a palimpsest of sketches, blind alleys, dead ends, demos, and outtakes. So it’s no great surprise to learn that London Calling, the Clash’s double-album masterpiece, exists as an earlier version, recorded by the band themselves on four-track tape machines at their rehearsal space in central London. What is maybe surprising is how good these early recordings are, and that they exist at all. Called The Vanilla Tapes, after the name of their studio, the tapes—though certainly rough—represent what The Guardian calls “a collection of demos and rehearsals that still manage to sound more focused, intelligent and relevant than most of today’s young pretenders.” No need to name names; it’s not much of a stretch to say that no rock and roll band today sounds as interesting as the Clash did in their practices 35 years ago.

Recorded in 1979, then lost, it seemed, forever, the tapes lived only in rumors and sly hints dropped by Joe Strummer of a self-recorded LP. That is until March of 2004, when Mick Jones discovered them in a box and “recognized them instantly for what they were.” The tapes, he said, “hadn’t been heard since before the record was made. It was pretty amazing.” These versions, writes Pat Gilbert at Mojo, are “clean, bright recordings that reveal a group who are evidently enjoying creating something organic and musical.”

Paul’s bass walks, hops and lopes as he feels himself into jazz, funk and disco. Mick plays economically, expertly and fluidly – intelligent licks and chops. Joe’s rhythm guitar cuts through like a man who learned his craft from old Bo Diddley, Bukka White and Chuck Berry records. Topper is magnificent – light, precise and clever. It’s London Calling stripped bare for combo playing: no horns, Hammond, piano, whistling.

At the top of the post, hear a rough take of “London Calling.” Aside from some hesitancy in Strummer’s delivery and a somewhat plodding opening, the recording captures—perhaps even more than the studio take—the apocalyptic dread of the song’s lyrical imagery. Some of the lines are different—London calls to the “the fools and the clowns” and “the mods on the run.” But this early version does have Strummer’s werewolf howl and canny summation of the turn-of-the decade zeitgeist. Above, we have the Vanilla Tapes version of “Rudie Can’t Fail” in all its funky ska immediacy. (Notice the descending melody in the chorus—which I almost like better than the album version’s ascending chorus—and the toasting interjections.) Just below, hear “Heart and Mind,” one of “five completely unknown Clash songs” that appears on the tapes, “a rocker,” writes Gilbert, “pitched somewhere between ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘Death or Glory.’”

Why this didn’t make the album, we’ll maybe never know, but the chorus is great—“You’ve got a heart / You’ve got a mind / But you can’t / Keep them in time.” The other four unearthed outtakes are “Where You Gonna Go (Soweto),” a rockabilly tune called “Lonesome Me,” “bluesy instrumental “Walking the Sidewalk,” and a reggae version of Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me.” The tapes “included 37 tracks in total… pared down” for release “to the 21 best versions.” Missing from The Vanilla Tapes are London Calling tracks “Spanish Bombs,” “The Card Cheat,” “Wrong ‘Em Boyo,” and “Train in Vain,” confirming “the received wisdom that (except “Wrong ‘Em Boyo”), these were written when The Clash were in Wessex recording the album proper.”

“Muddy, raw, and insistently vague,” writes Pitchfork, the tapes see the band “working hard, but also grasping for a muse.” They found a guiding creative force in producer Guy Stevens, who crafted their demos into the more polished, but still rough enough for punk, studio versions we know well. But even without the benefit of comparison with the brilliant realizations on the record, these early versions stand up on their own as the sound of a band with more rangy creative energy than most groups can muster over their entire careers. The tapes were included in the 25th anniversary legacy edition of London Calling, but you can hear them all on Youtube (listen to “Lost in the Supermarket” above). Like some commenters, you might be surprised to find you like some of these raw demos even better than their celebrated studio versions.

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

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50,000 Norman Rockwell Photographs Now Digitized and Available Online

in History, Photography | November 6th, 2014

Reference photo for Norman Rockwell’s portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, c. 1968. Courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum Collections.

Whatever you think of Norman Rockwell’s paintings and illustrations, you can’t deny them the status of enduring Americana. For my money, Rockwell’s images certainly make for more interesting representations of the culture than those of, say, Thomas Kinkade. But even if you have little interest in the America Rockwell created on paper and canvas, you’ll surely find compelling the America he captured in photographs. We now have unprecedented access to these thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that has enabled the Norman Rockwell Museum to digitize what they call the Norman Rockwell Photographic Print Collection: approximately 50,000 images that, according to archivist Venus Van Ness, “provide a unique window into Mr. Rockwell’s working process, his personal life, and the times in which he lived.”

Reference photo for “Portrait of a Geisha Girl,” Pan American- Japan (1956)

These images include “reference photos Rockwell used to compose his paintings, photos of work in progress, and candid shots of him working and interacting with John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and many other twentieth-century icons who posed for the artist in his Stockbridge studio, on location at a movie set, at the White House, or — as in the case of Kennedy — at his Hyannis Port home on Cape Cod.”

You can browse them on this page, which displays the search results for the word “photograph” in the Norman Rockwell Museum’s archives. And if you want to dig up those photos of Wayne, Ann-Margret, Kennedy, or other icons of what they call the American century, you can also add particular terms to search for specific subjects. Or you can even search for specific places, for instance Rockwell’s many reference photos for the ads he did for flights to Japan by Pan Am — naturally, the iconically American airline.

Reference photo of Norman Rockwell’s Portrait of Ann-Margret, c. 1965.

“To anyone who saw the exhibition Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, which was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum and opened at the Brooklyn Museum in November 2010,” writes Hyperallergic’s Benjamin Sutton, “the importance of photography to Rockwell’s practice is not news. That show juxtaposed some of Rockwell’s best known paintings like ‘New Kids in the Neighborhood’ (1967) and ‘Boy in a Dining Car’ (1946) with the many, many studio and documentary photos the artist took and spliced together before putting pencil to paper or paintbrush to canvas.” But now “the public and art historians can get a better sense of the laborious preliminary photography work that went into each of Rockwell’s images, and the exceptional level of access he was given to his subjects.” And though the process of browsing them may remain tricky for the time being, rest assured that, according to the official site, “the Museum’s new digital experiences project is getting underway with support from yet another IMLS matching grant awarded in September.” And so American innovation continues, on a level Rockwell could never have imagined.

This post comes via Hyperallergic, where you can see more photos in a nice, large format.

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

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A Visual Introduction to Soviet Montage Theory: A Revolution in Filmmaking

in Film | November 6th, 2014

Between 1908 and 1913, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith made over 400 movies. Over that time, he, along with his fellow Hollywood directors, developed continuity editing. Using such tools as matching eyelines – cutting so that the actors appear to be looking at each other across different shots – and the 180-degree rule – which keeps the actors from switching places on the screen – Griffith and his cohorts created a visual grammar that let audiences forget the film’s artifice and disappear into the story. By the time Griffith released his hugely influential (and hugely racist) masterwork A Birth of A Nation in 1915, the rules of continuity editing had more or less been worked out. This form of storytelling was so successful, and profitable, that it has been used for just about every Hollywood movie that has come out since.

Yet just as these rules were being codified, filmmakers, mostly European, looked for other ways to tell a story. German directors like F. W. Murnau and Robert Wiene experimented with cinematic depictions of the subconscious. French filmmakers like René Clair used camera tricks and odd framing to create works of formal beauty. But it was the filmmakers in the newly formed Soviet Union that really contributed a new way of thinking about film – Soviet Montage. You can watch a video about it above.

When the Bolshevik Revolution washed over the country, the number of films in the USSR dried up. One of the few movies available at VGIK, aka The Moscow Film School, was Griffith’s sprawling Intolerance (watch it online here). Lev Kuleshov, a young teacher there, started to take apart the movie and reorder the images. He discovered that the meaning of a scene was radically changed depending on the order of the shots. This led Kuleshov to try an experiment: he juxtaposed the image of a man with a blank expression with a bowl of soup, a young corpse in a coffin and a pretty girl. You can watch it below.

Invariably, audiences praised the actor for his subtlety of performance. Of course, there was no performance. The connection between the two images was made entirely within the head of the viewer. This realization would forever be commemorated in film schools everywhere as the Kuleshov Effect.

Using the French word for assemble, Kuleshov called this “montage.” At the school, however, there was considerable debate over what montage exactly was. One of Kuleshov’s students, Vsevolod Pudovkin envisioned each shot as a brick, one small part that together with other small parts created a cinematic edifice.

Another student, Sergei Eisenstein, proposed a far more dynamic, and revolutionary, form of montage. Eisenstein saw it “as an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.” An intellectual well versed in theory, Eisenstein compared montage to Karl Marx’s vision of history where a thesis smashes into its antithesis and together, from that wreckage, forms its synthesis.

Eisenstein’s greatest example of montage, and indeed one of the greatest examples of filmmaking ever, is the Odessa Steps scene from his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. In it, Czarist soldiers massacre a group of protestors, mostly women and children. You can watch it below.

As you can see, it’s a powerful piece of propaganda. There is no way to come away from this movie and not feel like the Czarists are anything but murderous villains. (Nevermind that the movie is wildly inaccurate, historically speaking.) Shots of a grieving mother juxtaposed with images of bayonet wielding troops result in a surprisingly visceral feeling of injustice.

In his writings, Eisenstein outlined the varying types of montage – five kinds in all. The most important, in his eyes, was intellectual montage – a method of placing images together in a way to evoke intellectual concepts. He was inspired by how Japanese and Chinese can create abstract ideas from concrete pictograms. For example, the Japanese symbol for tree is 木. One character for wall is 囗. Put the two together, 困, and you have the character for trouble, because having a tree in your wall is certainly a huge pain in the ass. You can see an example of intellectual montage in the end of the Odessa steps sequence when a stone lion seemingly rises to his feet.

Eisenstein decided to push this idea to the limit with his follow up, October. The movie is deeply strange to watch now. In one famous sequence, Eisenstein compares White Russian general Alexander Kerensky to a peacock and to a cheap Napoleon figurine. It’s proved to be an interesting intellectual exercise but one that left audiences, both then and now baffled.

And below is another, slightly funnier, certainly more contemporary, example of intellectual montage.

Many of the landmark films mentioned above can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

The Ebola Virus Explained with Animated Video

in Biology | November 6th, 2014

There’s just one small mention of the Ebola virus on the New York Times homepage right now. And it’s buried halfway down the page — which means that, no longer in panic mode, we can take a cool, calm and collected look at this virus called Ebola.“What does the Ebola virus actually do in your body? Why is it so dangerous and why does it kill so many people?” Those are the questions explored in a new video by Kurzgesagt, a Munich-based design studio that specializes in creating educational and scientific animations. Kurzgesagt, in case you’re wondering, means “in a nutshell” in German. As in, here’s the deal with Ebola in a nutshell.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essential Cooking Techniques: From Poaching Eggs to Shucking Oysters

Ricky Gervais Creates Outlandish Comedy with David Bowie

Simone de Beauvoir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and a Feminist (1960)

Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Playing Goalie: “What I Know Most Surely about Morality and Obligations, I Owe to Football”

Hear The Clash’s Vanilla Tapes, Demos of Nearly Every Song From London Calling

50,000 Norman Rockwell Photographs Now Digitized and Available Online

A Visual Introduction to Soviet Montage Theory: A Revolution in Filmmaking

The Ebola Virus Explained with Animated Video

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