Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life: Presented by Ryan Holiday

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This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams pro­filed Ryan Hol­i­day, a one-time pub­lic-rela­tions whiz-kid who’s rein­vent­ed him­self over the past decade as a speak­er for the dead: specif­i­cal­ly Epicte­tus, Seneca, and above all Mar­cus Aure­lius, the fig­ure­heads of the ancient school of phi­los­o­phy we now know as Sto­icism. It “cen­ters on four virtues:…

Destino: The Salvador Dalí — Disney Collaboration 57 Years in the Making

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In 2003, Dis­ney released a six minute ani­mat­ed short called Des­ti­no, final­ly bring­ing clo­sure to a project that began 57 years ear­li­er. The sto­ry of Des­ti­no goes way back to 1946 when two very dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al icons, Walt Dis­ney and Sal­vador Dalí, decid­ed to work togeth­er on a car­toon. The film was sto­ry­board­ed by Dalí and John Hench (a Dis­ney stu­dio artist) over the course of eight months. But then, rather abrupt­ly, the project got tabled when The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny ran into finan­cial prob­lems.

Now fast for­ward 53 years, to 1999. While work­ing on Fan­ta­sia 2000, Walt Dis­ney’s nephew redis­cov­ered the project and 17 sec­onds of orig­i­nal ani­ma­tion. Using this clip and the orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards, 25 ani­ma­tors brought the film to com­ple­tion and pre­miered it at The New York Film Fes­ti­val in 2003. Des­ti­no would receive an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for the Best Ani­mat­ed Short Film, among oth­er acco­lades from crit­ics.

The clip runs 6+ min­utes and fea­tures music writ­ten by Mex­i­can song­writer Arman­do Dominguez and per­formed by Dora Luz. In our archive, we also have […]

The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the Greatest Animations (1965)

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For obvi­ous rea­sons, most art pro­duced under oppres­sive regimes comes off as painstak­ing­ly inof­fen­sive. For equal­ly obvi­ous rea­sons, the rare works that crit­i­cize the regime tend to do so rather oblique­ly. This was­n’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion ani­ma­tor Jiří Trn­ka, “the Walt…

The Isolated Bass Grooves of The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh (RIP)

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This past Fri­day, the bassist of The Grate­ful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost imme­di­ate­ly the trib­utes poured in, most rec­og­niz­ing that Lesh was­n’t your ordi­nary bassist. As Jon Par­e­les wrote in the New York Times, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass lines hopped and bub­bled and con­stant­ly con­versed…

When 20,000 Americans Held a Pro-Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden

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Above, two-time Acad­e­my Award nom­i­nee Mar­shall Cur­ry presents A Night at The Gar­den, a film that revis­its a night in Feb­ru­ary 1939 when “20,000 Amer­i­cans ral­lied in New York’s Madi­son Square Gar­den to cel­e­brate the rise of Nazism — an event large­ly for­got­ten from U.S. his­to­ry.” As we described it back in 2017,…