Rare Recordings of Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg & More Now Available in a Digital Archive Created by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

Image via Chris­ti­aan Ton­nis

Amer­i­cans can be quite igno­rant of the rich­ness of our coun­try’s cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Part of this igno­rance, I sus­pect, comes down to prej­u­dice. Inno­v­a­tive Amer­i­can artists through­out his­to­ry have come from groups often demo­nized and mar­gin­al­ized by the wider soci­ety. The dom­i­nance of cor­po­rate com­merce also impov­er­ish­es the cul­tur­al land­scape. Poet­ry and exper­i­men­tal art don’t sell much, so some peo­ple think they have lit­tle val­ue.

Imag­ine if we were to invert these atti­tudes in pub­lic opin­ion: Amer­i­can poet­ry and art allow us to gain new per­spec­tives from peo­ple and parts of the coun­try we don’t know well; to enlarge and chal­lenge our reli­gious and polit­i­cal under­stand­ing; to expe­ri­ence a very dif­fer­ent kind of econ­o­my, built on aes­thet­ic inven­tion and free intel­lec­tu­al enter­prise rather than sup­ply, demand, and prof­it. Cre­ativ­i­ty and finance are not, of course, mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. But to con­sis­tent­ly favor one at the expense of the oth­er seems to me a great loss to every­one.

We find our­selves now in such a sit­u­a­tion, as pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, and the Cor­po­ra­tion for Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing face severe cuts or pos­si­ble de-fund­ing.

Such a polit­i­cal move would dev­as­tate many of the insti­tu­tions that fos­ter and pre­serve the country’s art and cul­ture, and rel­e­gate the arts to the pri­vate sphere, where only sums of pri­vate mon­ey deter­mine whose voic­es get heard. We can, how­ev­er, be very appre­cia­tive of pri­vate insti­tu­tions who make their col­lec­tions pub­lic through open access libraries like the Inter­net Archive.

One such col­lec­tion comes from the Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives Unit of Deck­er Library at the Mary­land Insti­tute Col­lege of Art (MICA), one of the old­est art col­leges in the U.S., and one of the most high­ly regard­ed. They have dig­i­tal­ly donat­ed to Archive.org “a num­ber of rare and pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased audio record­ings,” they write in a press release, “span­ning the 1960s through the late 1990s” and con­sist­ing of “over 700 audio­cas­sette tapes” doc­u­ment­ing “lit­er­a­ture and poet­ry read­ings, fine art and design lec­tures, race and cul­ture dis­cus­sions” and col­lege events.

These include (enter the archive here) a two hour poet­ry read­ing from Allen Gins­berg in 1978, at the top, with sev­er­al oth­er read­ings and talks from Gins­berg in the archive, the read­ing below it from Eileen Myles in 1992, and read­ings and talks above and below from Amiri Bara­ka, Anne Wald­man, and William S. Bur­roughs. The col­lec­tion rep­re­sents a “strong focus on lit­er­a­ture and poet­ry,” and fea­tures “a sym­po­sium on the Black Moun­tain poets.” Giv­en the school’s mis­sion, you’ll also find in the archive “a large selec­tion of talks and lec­tures by visu­al artists, such as Elaine de Koon­ing, Alice Neel, Gor­don Parks, Ad Rhine­hart and Ben Shahn.”

Col­lec­tions like this one from MICA and the Inter­net Archive allow any­one with inter­net access to expe­ri­ence in some part the breadth and range of Amer­i­can art and poet­ry, no mat­ter their lev­el of access to pri­vate insti­tu­tions and sources of wealth. But the inter­net can­not ful­ly replace or sup­plant the need for pub­licly fund­ed arts ini­tia­tives in com­mu­ni­ties nation­wide.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An 18-Hour Playlist of Read­ings by the Beats: Ker­ouac, Gins­berg & Even Bukows­ki Too

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Hear Allen Gins­berg Teach “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”: Audio Lec­tures from His 1977 & 1981 Naropa Cours­es

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

An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary Time

OC bachelor coobook illustration

By the time I got to high school, home eco­nom­ics class­es had fall­en out of favor: the boys, of course, con­sid­ered them too “girly,” and the girls con­sid­ered them enforcers of tra­di­tion­al gen­der roles whol­ly out of place in mod­ern soci­ety. At that time, Amer­i­ca’s wide­spread obses­sion with food still had a few years before its full bloom, and now I imag­ine that learn­ing to cook has regained a cer­tain cachet even among teenagers. But what of “home eco­nom­ics” itself, that curi­ous ban­ner that com­bines a def­i­n­i­tion of eco­nom­ics nobody now quite rec­og­nizes with the less-than-fash­ion­able con­cepts of domes­tic­i­ty, prac­ti­cal­i­ty, and neces­si­ty?

You can get a sense of the field­’s his­to­ry with a vis­it to the Cook­book and Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion at the Inter­net Archive. Its items, drawn from the Young Research Library Depart­ment of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at UCLA, the Ban­croft Library at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and the Prelinger Library, “take us back to an Amer­i­ca in the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry cov­er­ing top­ics on cook­ery, tex­tiles, fam­i­ly and home, bud­get­ing, domes­tic sci­ences, and many oth­er delight­ful top­ics.” Some will find them more inher­ent­ly delight­ful than will oth­ers, but the his­tor­i­cal val­ue remains unde­ni­able: each and every book in the col­lec­tion takes us back to a dif­fer­ent time and place with its own inter­ests and pri­or­i­ties, in the kitchen as well as else­where in the home.

At the Inter­net Archive blog, Jeff Kaplan high­lights such works as the Pil­grim Cook Bookpub­lished by Chicago’s Pil­grim Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church Ladies’ Aid Soci­ety in 1921 and includ­ing recipes for Sausage in Pota­to Box­es, Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauer­kraut Can­dy; 1912’s more sub­dued Food for the invalid and the con­va­les­cent, with its Beef Juice, Meat Jel­ly, Crack­er Gru­el, and advice that, “among oth­er things, beer and pick­les are bad for chil­dren”; and even old­er, 1906’s A bach­e­lors cup­board; con­tain­ing crumbs culled from the cup­boards of the great unwed­ded which, warn­ing that “the day of of the ‘dude’ has passed and the weak­ling is rel­e­gat­ed to his right­ful sphere in short order,” offers meth­ods for the mak­ing of dish­es with names like Bed-Spread For Two, Indi­an Dev­il Mix­ture, Hot Birds, and Finnan Had­die.

If we dis­missed what­ev­er they taught in high school Home Ec as old-fash­ioned, then boy, the wis­dom pre­served in this cor­ner of the Inter­net Archive exists on a whole oth­er plane. But it also con­tains more than laughs: the seri­ous stu­dent of cui­sine and its his­to­ry will also find the likes of 1907’s A Guide to Mod­ern Cook­ery, the work of French “king of chefs and chef of kings” Auguste Escoffi­er, as well as — stick­ing, sen­si­bly, to that most Epi­cure­an of all nations — Le grand dic­tio­n­naire de cui­sine, a 1200-page ency­clo­pe­dia-cook­book pub­lished just after the death of its author, The Three Mus­ke­teers author Alexan­dre Dumas. As rel­e­vance goes, both of them of them sure­ly hold up far bet­ter than, say, The whole duty of a woman, or, An infal­li­ble guide to the fair sex: con­tain­ing rules, direc­tions, and obser­va­tions, for their con­duct and behav­ior through all ages and cir­cum­stances of life, as vir­gins, wives, or wid­ows.

Enter the archive of 3,000+ cook­books and home ec texts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

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

1967 Cook­book Fea­tures Recipes by the Rolling Stones, Simon & Gar­funkel, Bar­bra Streisand & More

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Download 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them However You Like

Fea­tures, com­mer­cials, art pieces, stock footage, home movies, pro­pa­gan­da: the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma so far has pro­duced count­less indi­vid­ual forms, all of which also count as doc­u­men­taries. Watch any kind of film made suf­fi­cient­ly long ago and you look through a win­dow onto the atti­tudes, aes­thet­ics, and accou­trements of anoth­er time.

And if it’s one made long enough ago or of obscure enough own­er­ship to fall into the pub­lic domain, you can incor­po­rate that piece of his­to­ry into your own mod­ern, era-span­ning work in any way you like. Now, Prelinger Archives has made that eas­i­er than ever by mak­ing more than 6600 films free on the Inter­net Archive to down­load and use.

“Prelinger Archives was found­ed in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City,” says the col­lec­tion’s about page. “Over the next twen­ty years, it grew into a col­lec­tion of over 60,000 ‘ephemer­al’ (adver­tis­ing, edu­ca­tion­al, indus­tri­al, and ama­teur) films. In 2002, the film col­lec­tion was acquired by the Library of Con­gress, Motion Pic­ture, Broad­cast­ing and Record­ed Sound Divi­sion,” and now holds “approx­i­mate­ly 11,000 dig­i­tized and video­tape titles (all orig­i­nal­ly derived from film) and a large col­lec­tion of home movies, ama­teur and indus­tri­al films acquired since 2002.” Its mis­sion? “To col­lect, pre­serve, and facil­i­tate access to films of his­toric sig­nif­i­cance that haven’t been col­lect­ed else­where.”

And what can you find amid these 6000-odd pieces of ephemera host­ed on Archive.org? At first glance, they may real­ly strike you as 6000 odd pieces. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured 1958’s Have I Told You Late­ly That I Love You?, a UCLA stu­dent short Ayun Hal­l­i­day described as the tale of “a white-col­lar dad and house­wife mom… marooned in their indi­vid­ual exis­ten­tial hells, unable to con­nect” due to the labor-sav­ing devices of the day. 1965’s equal­ly cau­tion­ary (as well as often unin­ten­tion­al­ly hilar­i­ous) Per­ver­sion for Prof­it, offers a stern two-part warn­ing against the “pornog­ra­phy which may appear at the local news­stand, malt shop or drug­store.”

Mid­cen­tu­ry moral­ism man­i­fests in count­less enter­tain­ing forms across the Prelinger Archives col­lec­tion, includ­ing in Make Mine Free­dom, a Cold War car­toon treat­ment of the var­i­ous treach­er­ous “-isms” out to under­mine truth, jus­tice, and the Amer­i­can Way. That came out in 1948, just as fears start­ed roil­ing again after the Unit­ed States’ vic­to­ry in the Sec­ond World War. The year before, the hus­band-and-wife exper­i­men­tal film­mak­ing team of Alexan­der Ham­mid and Maya Deren com­plet­ed The Pri­vate Life of a Cat“Using their own cats in their own apart­ment,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Amber Frost, “they chron­i­cle the inte­ri­or world of a cat ‘fam­i­ly,’ and it’s just insane­ly com­pelling, even out­side of the cat-lady milieu!” Fur­ther down, we have House in the Mid­dle (1954), which sug­gests that a clean, tidy house can help you sur­vive an atom­ic blast.

But you don’t have to watch every­thing you dig up from the Prelinger Archives col­lec­tion in an iron­ic or avant-garde frame of mind. Some pieces, like ama­teur film­mak­er and inven­tor Tul­lio Pel­le­grini’s 1955 Cin­e­mas­cope homage to the city of San Fran­cis­co just above, offer much in the way of pure his­tor­i­cal inter­est. You can find a few more sug­ges­tions about where to start from Tim Brookes at MakeUse­Of, who high­lights even ear­li­er footage of the City by the Bay, per­haps the most gener­ic film ever made, and instruc­tions on what to do on a date as well as what to do in the event of a nuclear attack — all valu­able mate­r­i­al for those of us remix­ing his­to­ry, one ephemer­al clip at a time.

One final thing worth keep­ing in mind, the Archive comes with this invi­ta­tion:

You are warm­ly encour­aged to down­load, use and repro­duce these films in whole or in part, in any medi­um or mar­ket through­out the world. You are also warm­ly encour­aged to share, exchange, redis­trib­ute, trans­fer and copy these films, and espe­cial­ly encour­aged to do so for free. Any deriv­a­tive works that you pro­duce using these films are yours to per­form, pub­lish, repro­duce, sell, or dis­trib­ute in any way you wish with­out any lim­i­ta­tions.

If you hap­pen to get cre­ative with the films in the Archive, please feel free to share your cre­ations in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Have I Told You Late­ly That I Love You?: A 1958 Look at How Mod­ern Gad­gets & Con­ve­niences Lead to Exis­ten­tial Hell

This is Cof­fee!: A 1961 Trib­ute to Our Favorite Stim­u­lant

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

1,000,000 Min­utes of News­reel Footage by AP & British Movi­etone Released on YouTube

The Pub­lic Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Online Knitting Reference Library: Download 300 Knitting Books Published From 1849 to 2012

Mother's Knitter

No need to scram­ble to the fall­out shel­ter, friends.

That mas­sive boom you just heard is mere­ly the sound of thou­sands of crafters’ minds being blown en masse by the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­hamp­ton’s Knit­ting Ref­er­ence Library, an exten­sive resource of books, cat­a­logues, pat­terns, jour­nals and magazines—over sev­en­teen decades worth.

Viva la Hand­made Rev­o­lu­tion!

The basics of the form—knit­ting, purl­ing, increas­ing, decreas­ing, cast­ing on and off—have remained remark­ably con­sis­tent through­out the gen­er­a­tions. No won­der there’s an endur­ing tra­di­tion of learn­ing to knit at grandma’s knee…

What has evolved is the nature of the fin­ished prod­ucts.

Miss Lambert

Miss Lam­bert’s “Baby Quilt in Stripes of Alter­nate Col­ors” from her 1847 Knit­ting Book could still hold its own against any oth­er hand­craft­ed show­er gift, but even the most hard­core mod­ern crafter would find it chal­leng­ing to find tak­ers for her “Car­riage Sock,” which is meant to be worn over the shoe.

Trawlers

Dit­to the “Woolen Hel­mets” in Help­ing the Trawlers, a 32-page pam­phlet pub­lished by the Roy­al Nation­al Mis­sion to Deep Sea Fish­er­men. The hope was that civic-mind­ed knit­ters might be moved to donate hand­made socks, mit­tens, and oth­er items to com­bat the chill faced by poor work­ing men fac­ing the ele­ments on freez­ing decks.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the eager vol­un­teer knit­ting force grav­i­tat­ed toward the pamphlet’s most baroque item, putting the pub­lish­er in a del­i­cate posi­tion:

Owing, per­haps, to their nov­el­ty, a great many friends com­mence work­ing for the Soci­ety by mak­ing these arti­cles and the Uhlan caps, and we are apt, on this account, to get rather more of them than we require for our North Sea work. The Labrador fish­er­men val­ue the hel­mets equal­ly with their North Sea breathren, and thus there is an ample out­put for them, but we shall be glad if friends will bear the hint in mind, and make some of the oth­er things in pref­er­ence to the hel­mets and Uhlan caps.

Woollen Helmets

All of the books in the Knit­ting Ref­er­ence Library are open access, though many of the pat­terns and mag­a­zines are depen­dent on copy­right clear­ance. Give a prowl, and you’ll find that a few of the old­er pat­terns are avail­able as down­load­able, print­able PDFs , such as this hand­some gent’s cable knit pullover or the tricky 50’s bison cardi­gan, below.

Bison Cardigan

Even with­out step-by-step instruc­tions, the pat­tern envelopes’ cov­er images can still pro­vide inspiration…and no small degree of amuse­ment. Some enter­pris­ing librar­i­an should get crack­ing on a sub-col­lec­tion, Fash­ion Crimes Against Male Knitwear Mod­els, 1960–1980:

Knitting Crime 1

Knitting Crime 2

Knitting Crime 3

There’s even some­thing for the lat­ter day Labrador trawler...

Balaclava

The entire col­lec­tion can be viewed here. For view­ing and print­ing pat­terns, we rec­om­mend select­ing “PDF” from the list of down­load options.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Dr. Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

See Pen­guins Wear­ing Tiny “Pen­guin Books” Sweaters, Knit­ted by the Old­est Man in Aus­tralia

The Whole Earth Cat­a­log Online: Stew­art Brand’s “Bible” of the 60s Gen­er­a­tion

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

Archive of 35,000 TV Political Ads Launched, Creating a Badly Needed Way to Hold Politicians Accountable

The long-loom­ing 2016 Unit­ed States pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has already got many of us, even (or maybe espe­cial­ly) non-Amer­i­cans, instinc­tive­ly flinch­ing at any­thing that smacks of polit­i­cal cam­paign­ing. Giv­en that the noise has noth­ing to do but inten­si­fy, how do we stay sane for the dura­tion of the year, not to men­tion able to tell the cred­i­ble claims from the incred­i­ble?

I rec­om­mend get­ting some per­spec­tive with a vis­it to the Inter­net Archive’s new­ly opened Polit­i­cal TV Ad Archive. Its cre­ators have, “after sift­ing through more than 100,000 hours of broad­cast tele­vi­sion cov­er­age and count­ing,” orga­nized “more than 30,000 ad air­ings” into a site meant to, in the words of Inter­net Archive’s Tele­vi­sion Archive Man­ag­ing Edi­tor Nan­cy Watz­man, “bring jour­nal­ists, researchers, and the pub­lic resources to help hold politi­cians account­able for the mes­sages they deliv­er in TV ads.” A for­mi­da­ble task, giv­en that the cur­rent storm of polit­i­cal ads in which we find our­selves comes as only the lat­est vis­it of the larg­er bliz­zard of polit­i­cal ads that has swirled around us since Eisen­how­er answered Amer­i­ca 55 years ago.

At this point, even the most well-informed and media-lit­er­ate among us face a dif­fi­cult search for clar­i­ty amid all the slant­ed­ly aggres­sive “mes­sag­ing,” and so the Polit­i­cal TV Ad Archive has accom­pa­nied its data with links to “fact-check­ing and fol­low-the-mon­ey jour­nal­ism by the project’s part­ners,” which include the Amer­i­can Press Insti­tute, the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integri­ty, FactCheck.org, and The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Fact Check­er. “Before the pri­maries are over, the pub­lic in key pri­ma­ry states will be buried in cam­paign ads gen­er­at­ing more heat than light,” Watz­man quotes Tele­vi­sion Archive direc­tor Roger Mac­don­ald as say­ing, high­light­ing the ease with which it lets us “have a bet­ter chance at sep­a­rat­ing lies from truths and learn who is pay­ing for the ads.”

What has the project found so far? To take exam­ples just from its scruti­ny of the can­di­dates draw­ing the most media atten­tion, part­ner Poli­ti­fact “rat­ed a claim in this Don­ald Trump cam­paign ad as ‘Pants on Fire’ because it pro­claimed that Trump would ‘stop ille­gal immi­gra­tion by build­ing a wall on our south­ern bor­der that Mex­i­co will pay for,’ while show­ing footage not of Mex­i­can immi­grants, but rather of refugees stream­ing into Moroc­co that had been pulled from an Ital­ian news net­work.”

On the oth­er side of the great divide, part­ner FactCheck.org “report­ed that a Hillary Clin­ton TV ad that claimed that drug prices had dou­bled in the last sev­en years was inac­cu­rate,” claim­ing that “brand-name drug prices on aver­age have more than dou­bled” when “more than 80 per­cent of filled pre­scrip­tions are gener­ic drugs, and those prices have declined by near­ly 63 per­cent, that same report says.”

The les­son to take away so far: ads are ads, and polit­i­cal ads are even more so. We have no defense against them but what facts we learn and what degree of hair-trig­ger skep­ti­cism we bring to the table, both of which tools like the Polit­i­cal TV Ad Archive can only increase. Eval­u­ate these flur­ries of claims from all sides as best you can with­out get­ting too obses­sive about it, and you’ll sure­ly sur­vive 2016 with your rea­son intact, and even a thing or two learned about the dark arts of polit­i­cal adver­tise­ment. Stay smart out there, ladies and gen­tle­men — espe­cial­ly if you live in a swing state.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eisen­how­er Answers Amer­i­ca: The First Polit­i­cal Adver­tise­ments on Amer­i­can TV (1952)

Dizzy Gille­spie Runs for US Pres­i­dent, 1964. Promis­es to Make Miles Davis Head of the CIA

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Naropa Archive Presents 5,000 Hours of Audio Recordings of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & Other Beat Writers

Image via Chris­ti­aan Ton­nis

Schools like Har­vard, Oxford, and the Sor­bonne sure­ly have qual­i­ties to rec­om­mend them, but to my mind, noth­ing would feel quite as cool as say­ing your degree comes from the Jack Ker­ouac School of Dis­em­bod­ied Poet­ics. If you aspire to say it your­self, you’ll have to apply to Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty, which Tibetan Bud­dhist teacher (and, inci­den­tal­ly, Oxford schol­ar) Chö­gyam Trung­pa estab­lished in Boul­der, Col­orado in 1974. This rare, accred­it­ed, “Bud­dhist-inspired” Amer­i­can school has many unusu­al qual­i­ties, as you’d expect, but, as many of us remem­ber from our teenage years, your choice of uni­ver­si­ty has as much to do with who has passed through its halls before as what you think you’ll find when you pass through them. Naropa, besides nam­ing a school after the late Ker­ouac has host­ed the likes of Allen Gins­berg, Anne Wald­man, William S. Bur­roughs, Gre­go­ry Cor­so, Philip Whalen, and Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti.

But you don’t actu­al­ly have to attend Naropa to par­take of its Beat lega­cy. At the Naropa Poet­ics Audio Archives, freely brows­able at the Inter­net Archive, you can hear over 5000 hours of read­ings, lec­tures, per­for­mances, sem­i­nars, pan­els, and work­shops record­ed at the school and fea­tur­ing the afore­men­tioned lumi­nar­ies and many oth­ers. “The Beat writ­ers had inter­vened on the cul­ture,” says Wald­man in an inter­view about her book Beats at Naropa. “It wasn’t just a mat­ter of sim­ply offer­ing the usu­al kind of writ­ing work­shops, but read­ing and think­ing lec­tures, pan­els, pre­sen­ta­tions as well. The Beat writ­ers have been excep­tion­al as polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al activists, inves­tiga­tive work­ers, trans­la­tors, Bud­dhists, envi­ron­men­tal activists, fem­i­nists, seers. There’s so much leg­endary his­to­ry here.” Empha­sis — I repeat, 5000 hours — on so much.

To help you dive into this leg­endary his­to­ry, we’ve round­ed up today some pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured high­lights from Naropa. Begin here, and if you keep going, you’ll dis­cov­er vari­eties of Beat expe­ri­ence even we’ve nev­er had — and maybe you’ll even con­sid­er putting in a Ker­ouac School appli­ca­tion, and doing some cul­tur­al inter­ven­tion of your own.

Enter the Naropa Audio Archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl (1959)

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Har­vard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course

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.

The Internet Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vintage Video Games in Your Web Browser (Free)

internet arcade

A year ago, Col­in Mar­shall told you all about the Inter­net Archive’s His­tor­i­cal Soft­ware Archive, which lets nos­tal­gic web users play vin­tage com­put­er games in their web brows­er — games like Namco’s Pac-Man, or a 1982 ver­sion of E.T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al. The Archive has kept nudg­ing along this project, and last week­end they launched the Inter­net Arcade, a web-based library of 900 arcade (coin-oper­at­ed) video games made between the 1970s and 1990s. Dig Dug, Bez­erk, Frog­ger, Tetris, Don­key Kong, Street Fight­er II — they are all there.

The games will run in your web brows­er via a Javascript emu­la­tor. Last year, the Inter­net Archive told us that Fire­fox was best opti­mized to run these free games. If you encounter issues with con­trol, sound, or oth­er tech­ni­cal prob­lems, you can read this entry for some com­mon solu­tions.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play­ing a Video Game Could Cut the Risk of Demen­tia by 48%, Sug­gests a New Study

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Roman­tic Poets: Shel­ley, Byron, Keats

 

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Run Vintage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Software in Your Web Browser, Thanks to Archive.org

karateka-apple-ii-screen3

Note: If you’re hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties get­ting this soft­ware run­ning in your brows­er give Fire­fox a try. It seems to work the best.

Movies, com­mer­cials, radio shows, even books: we’ve enjoyed the abil­i­ty to effort­less­ly pull up things we remem­ber from our child­hood on the inter­net just long enough that it feels strange and uncom­fort­able when we can’t. Up until now, though, we haven’t had an easy way to re-expe­ri­ence the com­put­er soft­ware we remem­ber using in decades past. In my case, of course — and like­ly in a fair few of yours as well — I spent most of my com­put­er time in decades past play­ing games and not, say, build­ing bal­ance sheets. But whichev­er you did, the Inter­net Archive’s new­ly opened His­tor­i­cal Soft­ware Archive makes it easy to re-live those old days at the key­board with­out hav­ing to buy a vin­tage com­put­er on eBay, track down its soft­ware, remem­ber all its required com­mands and key­strokes, and hope the flop­py discs — or, heav­en help us, cas­sette tapes — boot up cor­rect­ly. They’ve made these wealth of games, appli­ca­tions, and odd­i­ties freely avail­able with the devel­op­ment of JMESS, a Javascript-pow­ered ver­sion of the Mul­ti Emu­la­tor Super Sys­tem, “a mature and breath­tak­ing­ly flex­i­ble com­put­er and con­sole emu­la­tor that has been in devel­op­ment for over a decade and a half by hun­dreds of vol­un­teers.”

mystery-house

They say a bit more about the tech­nol­o­gy behind all this on the Inter­net Archive Blog, and the His­tor­i­cal Soft­ware Archive’s front page offers rec­om­men­da­tions for which “ground-break­ing and his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant soft­ware prod­ucts” to try first, includ­ing 1.) Jor­dan Mech­n­er’s Karate­ka (top), a hot game in 1980 and the most pop­u­lar item in the archive today; 2) Sier­ra On-Line’s Mys­tery House (above), which gave rise more or less by itself to a vast genre of graph­ic adven­tures; 3) three adap­ta­tions of Nam­co’s Pac-Man (one for the Atari 2600, one remade for that same con­sole, one law­suit-induc­ing knock­off for the less­er-known Odyssey2); 4) E.T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al, a “1982 adven­ture video game devel­oped and pub­lished by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 video game con­sole;” and 5) Dan Brick­lin and Bob Frankston’s Visi-Calc (below), the grand­dad­dy of all spread­sheet pro­grams, and arguably the sin­gle appli­ca­tion that turned com­put­ing from hob­by into neces­si­ty. Or how about 6) Word­Star, the ear­ly word pro­cess­ing pro­gram? Just click on the “Run an in-brows­er emu­la­tion of the pro­gram” link to fire up any of these and, if you’re under about 30, expe­ri­ence just what com­put­er users of the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies had to deal with — and how much fun they had.

Visicalc

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Indie Video Game Mak­ers Are Chang­ing the Game

The Great Gats­by and Wait­ing for Godot: The Video Game Edi­tions

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

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 Ange­lesA Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.