Download Over 22,000 Golden & Silver Age Comic Books from the Comic Book Plus Archive

in Archives, Comics/Cartoons | March 10th, 2014

The decade beginning with the late 1930s is known as the Golden Age of comic books. Many of the superheroes from today’s blockbuster franchises, including Batman, Superman, and Captain America, emerged during this period, and the industry grew into a commercial powerhouse. Following a sales dip during the early 1950s that marked the end of the Golden Age, the Silver Age began (circa 1956) and lasted for some fifteen years.

During this era, superhero comic books initially lost steam — letting stories of horror, romance, and crime grow in popularity — before emerging triumphantly once more with characters like Spider-Man and The Flash. While copyright remains very much in effect for such titles, a slew of comic books from the same period, many of which have narrowly missed attaining such iconic status, are available online at Comic Book Plus.

Similar to the Digital Comic Museum, which we wrote about last week, Comic Book Plus contains a near inexhaustible quantity of Golden and Silver Age comic books. The collection’s timespan ranges from the late 1930s through to the early 1960s, and includes many thousands of comic books in the Superhero, Sci-Fi, and Horror genres.

Those hankering for something a little more unusual will also be in luck. Desperate to read about a hospital romance? Why not give Linda Lark Student Nurse a read in the Medical Love category? Sick of landlubbers hogging all the attention in comic books? Head to the Water/Boats section, where you can read all about Davy Jones, the navy lieutenant who lives in Atlantis and does battle with the evil Dr. Fang, in Undersea Agent.

Comic Book Plus also has a terrific selection of foreign comic books, including impressive collections in German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. You can see Super Hombre here.

Finally, the site contains a number of U.S. government educational pamphlets, including Bert The Turtle Says Duck And Cover, a guide to surviving atomic bomb blasts.

For further reading, head on over to Comic Book Plus. You can preview all materials without registration. But you will need to register (for free) if you want to download the various comic books.

H/T to Yocitrus for making us aware of this archive.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Martin Scorsese, Sonic Youth, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson & Other Icons List Their Top 10 Art Films

in Film | March 10th, 2014

If you are a movie maven, you know about the Criterion Collection. Since the days of Laserdiscs, Criterion has made a name for itself by amassing a vast and thorough catalog of indie films, art house flicks and the occasional blockbuster. They distribute DVDs of directors as diverse as Akira Kurosawa, Jane Campion, and Stan Brakhage.

For their website, Criterion has asked a number of filmmakers, writers and other cultural figures to come up with their Top 10 Criterion movies ever. They are fascinating, illuminating and often surprising.

The late, great band Sonic Youth – which made a name for itself for its loud, growling guitars and endless layers of noisy feedback — picked some remarkably quiet, meditative movies: Yasujiro Ozu’s contemplative late masterpiece Floating Weeds tops the list and Chantal Akerman’s three-hour long minimalist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles comes in at number two.

Likewise, low-budget horror legend Roger Corman picked Michelangelo Antonioni’s high art masterpiece L’avventura as his top pick. “Never has ‘waiting around’ been so glorious,” he writes.

Less surprising are Martin Scorsese’s picks. He puts Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan at number one and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Technicolor marvel The Red Shoes at number two. Scorsese has on multiple occasions declared his love of the former and was central to getting the latter restored.

Edgar Wright – director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and last summer’s apocalyptic comedy The World’s End – proudly picked Brian DePalma’s Blow Out as his top movie. “I have heard people call themselves Brian De Palma apologists,” he writes. “I am proud to say that I am a huge fan without any caveats.”

And The Exorcist director William Friedkin reveals himself to be a fan of Alain Resnais, placing both Night and Fog and The Last Year at Marienbad high on his list. His praise of the recently departed French New Wave icon’s most famous movie is also an eloquent defense of any challenging movie.

I’ve seen Marienbad at least twenty times over the past fifty years, and I don’t understand one scene of it, but what a fantastic experience. I don’t  understand the Grand Canyon or Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, either, but they continue to move me.

You can see all of the Criterion top ten lists here. Other figures on the list include Jonathan Lethem, the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, James Franco, Lena Dunham, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson, John Lurie, Brie Larson, Donald Fagen & More.

Martin Scorsese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preservation)

Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Created)

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.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

200 Free Documentaries: A Super Rich List of Finely-Crafted Documentaries on the Web

in Film | March 8th, 2014

I’ve often called documentary my favorite kind of film, knowing full well that the label designates less a defined genre than a usefully malleable description. What does a documentary have? An unscripted, nonfictional story; interviews; footage candidly shot — maybe. It may also include scripted, staged, fictional material, and may treat real events in a fictionalized manner or search for the reality in events clouded by fiction. For fine examples of the last, see the works of Errol Morris, four of which — A Brief History of Time on Stephen Hawking (above), November 22, 1963 on JFK, They Were There on IBM, and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe on, well, subject obvious – you can see right here in our collection of 200 free documentaries online. And speaking of Herzog, the other living filmmaker doing the most to push outward the boundaries of documentary, we have From One Second to the Next, on the dangers of texting while driving, and Portrait Werner Herzog, on his own life and work.

But cinema had the documentary long before it had the likes of Morris and Herzog, and our collection includes a diversity of such pictures from all over the past century. 1958’s Ansel Adams: Photographer, for instance, profiles in motion the practice of the man whose work in still imagery anticipated, in many ways, the modern nature documentary. Documentary films have arguably provided the richest means of viewing every kind of creative mind at work, from Alfred Hitchcock (The Men Who Made the Movies: Hitchcock, Dial H for Hitchcock) to James Joyce (The Trials of Ulysses) to Joni Mitchell (Woman of Heart and Mind) to Charles Bukowski (Born Into This). Some of them even came as early entries from not-yet famous directors, including Stanley Kubrick (Day of the Flight, Flying Padre, The Seafarers), Jean-Luc Godard (Operation Concrete), and Kevin Smith (Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary). Nobody can ever say where the documentary form will go next, but watch these 200 and you’ll have a pretty fair idea of all the exciting places — geographical, intellectual, personal, and artistic — it’s gone already.

See our collection of 200 free documentaries online, part of our larger collection of 635 Free Movies Online.

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch Alain Resnais’ Short, Evocative Film on the National Library of France (1956)

in Film | March 7th, 2014

French New Wave filmmaker Alain Resnais, who died at the age of 91 last week, changed cinema forever with a string of intellectually rigorous, nonlinear masterpieces like Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Both films are about Resnais’s two obsessions – time and memory. Hiroshima is about a doomed relationship between a French actress and a Japanese architect who are both haunted by the war. Marienbad is an enigmatic puzzle of a movie that sharply divided audiences – either you were mesmerized by the movie or you were bored and infuriated by it. For better or worse, Marienbad influenced generations of fashion photographers; Calvin Klein’s Obsession ads were directly influenced by the film.

Resnais got his start just after the war making short documentaries. His best known is Night and Fog (1955), a meditation on both the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust. And above you can see another one of his documentaries – his 1956 short Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memories). It was put online by Criterion.

While the movie beautifully shows off the labyrinthine expanse of the Bibliothèque nationale de France – its vast collection of books, manuscripts and documents along with herculean efforts to compile and organize all of its information – the film becomes a rumination on the lengths that humanity will go to keep from forgetting. The film features some gorgeous cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet and a soundtrack by Maurice Jarre. Check it out.

Toute la mémoire du monde will appear in our collection of 200 Free Documentaries Online, part of our larger 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.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

William S. Burroughs Reads From Naked Lunch, His Controversial 1959 Novel

in Audio Books, Literature | March 7th, 2014

Published in 1959, Williams S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch ranks with other mid-twentieth century books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the works of Jean Genet as literature that sharply divided both critical and legal opinion in arguments over style and in questions of obscenity. Among its disturbing and subversive characters is the sociopathic surgeon Dr. Benway, who inspired the medical horrors of J.G. Ballard and was inspired in turn by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Benway provides some of the more satirical moments in the book, as you can hear in the section below, which Burroughs reads straight with his distinctive nasally Midwestern twang. A short film of the scene (sadly unembeddable), called “Dr. Benway Operates,” has Burroughs himself playing the doctor, in a dramatization that looks like low rent farce as directed by John Waters.

A series of loosely connected chapters that Burroughs said could be read in any order, Naked Lunch seems both fascinated and repelled by the grisly medicalized violence in scenes like those above (one vignette, for example, presents “a tract against capital punishment”). This ambivalence was not lost on writers like Norman Mailer. The highest praise of the novel probably came from Mailer during the novel’s 1966 obscenity trial before the Massachusetts Supreme Court. In one among a handful of literary depositions, including one from Allen Ginsberg, Mailer described Burroughs’ “extraordinary style,” and “exquisite poetic sense.” Despite the fact that its images were “often disgusting,” Mailer called the book “a deep work, a calculated work” that “captures that speech [‘gutter talk’] like no American writer I know.”

Perhaps one of the work’s most damning pieces of criticism comes from the Judicial Officer for the U.S. Postal Service, who called for the book’s banning, appraising the writing as “undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit.” Mailer, Ginsberg, and the book’s other supporters won out, a fact beat essayist Jed Birmingham laments, for a surprising reason: The unbanning of Naked Lunch led to the book’s taming, its gentrification, as it were: “The wild, exuberant offensiveness of the novel fades,” he writes, “in the face of all the legal arguments and the process of canonization.” In fact, the full novel may never have been published at all had it not been for the Post Office in Chicago seizing several hundred copies of The Chicago Review, which contained some few Naked Lunch sections. Hearing of the controversy, French publisher Maurice Girodias hastily threw together a manuscript of the first 1959 text.

And yet, prior to the mid-sixties, the decision to ban Naked Lunch, “even before it was published in book form,” meant “that questions of obscenity and censorship dictated the academic and public reception” of the book. Burroughs commented on the effects of such censorship—using an analogy to “the junk virus”—in part of a new preface to the 50th edition called “Afterthoughts on a Deposition.” The heath risks of opiates “in controlled doses,” he writes,“maybe be minimal,” yet the effects of criminalization are outsized “anti-drug hysteria,” which “poses a threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere.”

Since the novel’s vindication, critical consensus has centered around sober, reverent judgments like Mailer’s—and to some lesser extent Ginsberg’s terse, irritable testimony. While there are still those who despise the book, it’s significant that Burroughs’ work—which the Washington Post called the first of his “homosexual planet-operas”—has achieved such widespread admiration amidst the notoriety. The novel deals in themes we’re still adjudicating daily in courts legal and public some 55 years later, pointing perhaps to the continued gulf between the thoughts and aims of the reading public and those of hysterical authoritarians and “the media and narcotics officials,” as Burroughs has it. After all, at its 50th anniversary in 2009, Naked Lunch was pronounced “still fresh” by such mainstream outlets as NPR and The Guardian, evidence of its persistent power, and maybe also of its domestication.

Clips of Burroughs reading Naked Lunch can also be found on this Columbia University site.

William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing

William S. Burroughs Explains What Artists & Creative Thinkers Do for Humanity: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Explosive Cats Imagined in a Strange, 16th Century Military Manual

in History | March 7th, 2014

Paw prints and feline urine stains on a medieval scribe’s manuscript, perhaps they weren’t entirely out of the ordinary in the 15^th century. But cats strapped to mini-powder kegs, bounding off to burn down a town — now that’s pretty unusual.

The incendiary feline featured above (and elsewhere on this page) comes from a digitized version of an early 16^th century military manual written by Franz Helm. An artillery master, Helm wrote about a broad and imaginative set of destructive ideas for siege warfare. Although my German is somewhat rusty, I got the sense that he was awfully fond of exploding sacks, barrels, and various other receptacles, and eventually decided to combine these ideas with an unwitting animal delivery system. These animals, according to Helm’s guide, would allow a commander to “set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise.”

The text was originally digitized by the University of Pennsylvania, and a UPenn historian named Mitch Fraas decided to take a closer look at this strange exploding cat business. According to Fraas, the accompanying text reads:

“Create a small sack like a fire-arrow … if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.”

That’s the military strategy in a nutshell. Seems like a great idea, apart from the fact that cats are notoriously unpredictable. In any case, it’s Friday, so here are more illustrations of weaponized cats to round out your work week.

For more of Helm’s work, head on over to Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts.

via National Post

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Andy Warhol’s 1965 Film, Vinyl, Adapted from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

in Film | March 7th, 2014

Surely you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s version of A Clockwork Orange. But have you seen Andy Warhol’s? Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel of the robust culture of teenage violence in our freakish dystopian future caught the eye of not just the man who had previously made 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that of the man who had previously made the eight-hour still shot Empire as well. Warhol and Kubrick’s sensibilities differed, you might say, as did the means of production to which they had access, and a comparison of their Clockwork Orange adaptations highlights both. Using three shots in this 70-minute film instead of Empire’s one, Warhol creates, in the words of Ed Howard at Only the Cinema, “a strange and intriguing film which, like most of Warhol’s movies, often toes the line between slow and downright boring, a piece of “alienating, attitude-based cinema” that “provides no easy pleasures,” “replacing the conventional narrative drive with a cluttered mise-en-scene of bodies.” For all its cheapness, Warhol’s lo-fi cinematic rendition did at least come first, in 1965 to Kubrick’s 1971 — plus, you can watch it free on Youtube above.

“Vinyl is such a loose adaptation of the source novel that even people who have seen it should be forgiven for not realising that it is built on Burgess’s literary scaffold,” says the web site of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. “The film is presented as a series of images of brutality, beatings, torture and masochism all performed by a group of men under the gaze of a glamorous woman. In its preoccupations with pornography and violence, it bears many of the oblique hallmarks of Warhol’s work, along with a familiar cast of Factory regulars such as Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick and Ondine. The finished film is disturbing, contains unsimulated violent acts and is not very audience-friendly.” Either a strong disrecommendation or a strong recommendation, depending on your proclivities. And if none of that draws you, maybe the soundtrack including Martha and the Vandellas, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and the The Isley Brothers will. Did Warhol pay to license their songs? Given that he certainly didn’t look into obtaining the rights even to A Clockwork Orange, something inside me doubts it.

You can watch Three More 1960s “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol — Sleep, Eat & Kiss — in our 2011 post. They are otherwise listed in our collection of 635 Free Movies Online.

The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange

Andy Warhol Shoots “Screen Tests” of Nico, Bob Dylan & Salvador Dalí

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Last Time Lennon & McCartney Played Together Captured in A Toot And a Snore in ’74

in Music | March 6th, 2014

The number of Beatles bootlegs—in every possible medium and state of quality—must approach infinity. A person could spend a lifetime acquiring, cataloguing, scrutinizing, and discussing the relative merits of various outtakes, live recordings, demos, and studio goof-offs from the band and its individual members. It should go without saying that a great many of these artifacts have more historical than musical interest, given their fragmentary and unserious nature—and the simple barriers posed by bad recording. But while I imagine some angry antiquarian or zealous devotee interjecting here to tell me that absolutely everything the fab four touched turned directly to gold, I remain unsold on this article of faith.

So where are we average fans to place A Toot and a Snore in ’74, the bootleg album (above) recorded at Burbank Studios and featuring musical contributions from Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis, and Bobby Keys? Well, its historical value is beyond question, since it represents the only known record of John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing together after the Beatles’ breakup. Though their mutual dislike at this time was well-established and they hadn’t seen each other in three years, the tapes document a very laid-back session with the two legends—John on lead vocal and guitar, Paul singing harmonies and playing Ringo’s drumkit—letting go of the past and having some fun again. Lennon first mentioned the recording while discussing the possibility of reunion in the 1975 interview below (he’s surprisingly warm to the idea). At 1:45, he says, “I jammed with Paul. We did a lot of stuff in LA. There was 50 other people playing, but they were all just watching me and Paul.”

How does McCartney remember the session? “Hazy,” he said in a 1997 interview, “for a number of reasons.” The drugs were surely one of them. The title refers to Lennon offering Stevie Wonder coke in the opening track: “do you want a snort Steve? A toot? It’s going round….” The impromptu gathering convened on March 28 during the recording of Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats, which Lennon was producing. This was during Lennon’s so-called “lost weekend,” the year and a half during which he separated from Yoko, lived with their assistant May Pang, and did some serious drinking and drugs (as well as recording three albums).

Pang, who was present and plays tambourine, recalls it as a night of “joyous music” in her 1983 book Loving John, but you probably had to be there to fully appreciate it. As Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds notes, “it’s basically just a drunk, coked-up jam session.” But, he adds, “a drunk, coked-up jam session of great historical significance.” And for that reason alone, it’s worth a listen. Or, if you like, you can read a transcript of the ramble and banter over at Bootleg Zone. Consisting of lots of studio crosstalk, noodling improv, and a few attempted covers, the session was released by Germany’s Mistral Music in 1992, credited simply to “John and Paul.”

via Dangerous Minds

The 10-Minute, Never-Released, Experimental Demo of The Beatles’ “Revolution” (1968)

Hear the 1962 Beatles Demo that Decca Rejected: “Guitar Groups are on Their Way Out, Mr. Epstein”

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Download Over 22,000 Golden & Silver Age Comic Books from the Comic Book Plus Archive

Martin Scorsese, Sonic Youth, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson & Other Icons List Their Top 10 Art Films

200 Free Documentaries: A Super Rich List of Finely-Crafted Documentaries on the Web

Watch Alain Resnais’ Short, Evocative Film on the National Library of France (1956)

William S. Burroughs Reads From Naked Lunch, His Controversial 1959 Novel

Explosive Cats Imagined in a Strange, 16th Century Military Manual

Andy Warhol’s 1965 Film, Vinyl, Adapted from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

The Last Time Lennon & McCartney Played Together Captured in A Toot And a Snore in ’74

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