Watch Curated Playlists of Experimental Videos & Films to Get You Through COVID-19: Miranda July, Jan Švankmajer, Guy Maddin & More

in Film | March 25th, 2020

When we get sick, many of us habitually use the time away from work and other obligations to do the same thing: watch movies. But old favorites and recent releases we’d missed our first chance to catch can only last us so long: now, with so much of the world either sick or at home trying not to get sick, a combination of isolation and uncertainty about the state of things pushes us to seek out more cinematically daring fare. To satisfy this demand, Los Angeles filmmaker Kate Lain has created a collection called “CABIN FEVER: Coping with COVID-19 playlist of online experimental films & videos,” all of them free to watch online, begun “as an editable Google sheet on March 13 to gather some experimental films together based on moods one might be experiencing while being cooped up.”

Since then, Lain writes, “the list has morphed some, with some great new categories being added to the mix.” The most recent version of the spreadsheet, available in .XSLX and .PDF formats, includes such categories as “For when you need to laugh or smile,” “For when you’re stuck inside but want to be outside,” “Animals,” “Plants,” “Nostalgia,” and “Virus movies cuz why not.” (One such movie, Tuzan Wu’s Disease of Manifestation, appears at the top of the post.)

Within these and others appears the work of such filmmakers as Jan Švankmajer, Miranda July, Fernand Léger (previously featured here on Open Culture), Man Ray, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman. (Avant-garde enthusiasts may also rejoice at the sight of names like Hollis Frampton, James Benning, and Kenneth Anger.)

Inspired by Lain’s collection, Hyperallergic’s Dessane Lopez Cassell has “reached out to artists, filmmakers, and Hyperallergic contributors to assemble a list of what we’ve been sharing and encountering across our networks.” Their selections include Afronauts, “a luminous short which renders the story of the Zambian Space Program” — at which we looked back earlier this month — “as a dreamlike work of speculative fiction”; Bassem Saad’s Saint Rise, about the transportation of a statue of Saint Charbel (“now being heralded by conservative religious media as a healer of the Coronavirus,” the filmmaker adds) to a high mountaintop in Faraya, Lebabanon; and Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog (watch in full here and see the trailer below), described by critic Carman Tse as “a scene-by-scene recreation of Vertigo, made entirely of footage from other movies that take place in San Francisco.”

“There’s an especially funny montage right at the climax of the movie that uses Chuck Norris clips,” Tse notes, making The Green Fog a promising choice for those of us who need to lighten the mood of our isolation — and who also appreciate a high density of inter-cinematic reference. Hailing as he does from the notoriously wintry Canadian city of Winnipeg, Maddin himself surely knows a thing or two about how best to amuse oneself during long periods stuck indoors. Indeed, every artist growing up in circumstances of isolation, occasional or frequent, develops a strong appreciation and highly refined sense of artistic daring, one that unfailingly shows in their work when it debuts in the wider world. If we take this opportunity to expand the depth and breadth of our own viewing experiences, imagine how much more astute filmgoers we’ll be after the pandemic passes.

Find the Cabin Fever collection of experimental videos and films here. It currently has 284 videos on the list. Hyperallgeric adds yet more here.

A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from Early Japanese Cinema (1926)

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Experimental Film with Early Electronic Music Featuring Anaïs Nin (1952)

The Experimental Abstract Films of Pioneering American Animator Mary Ellen Bute (1930s-1950s)

Sigourney Weaver Stars in a New Experimental Sci-Fi Film: Watch “Rakka” Free Online

Use Your Time in Isolation to Learn Everything You’ve Always Wanted To: Free Online Courses, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Coloring Books & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

Meet the World’s First Known Author: Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

in Literature, Poetry | March 25th, 2020

Watchers of Westworld will have heard a character in the most recent episode utter the line, “for the first time, history has an author.” It’s as loaded a bit of dialogue as the series has dropped on fans, not least for its suggestion that in the absence of a god we should be better off with an all-knowing machine.

The line might bend the ear of literary scholars for another reason. The idea of authorship is a complicated one. In one sense, maybe, everyone is an author of history, and in another, perhaps no one is. But it’s difficult to comprehend these abstractions—we crave stories with strong characters, hence our veneration of Great Men and Women of the past.

Still, in many times and places, individual authorship was irrelevant. Renaissance thinkers revalued the author as an auctoritas, a worthy figure of influence and renown. “Death of the author” theorists pointed out that the appearance of a literary text could never be reduced to a single, unchanging personality. In religious studies, questions of authorship open onto minefield after minefield. There may be no commonly agreed-upon way to think about what an author is.

Does it make sense, then, to talk about the “world’s first author”? Perhaps. In the TED-Ed lesson above by Soraya Field Fiorio, we learn that the first known person to use written language for literary purposes was named was Enheduanna, a powerful Mesopotamian high priestess who wrote forty-two hymns and three epic poems in cuneiform 4,3000 hundred years ago.

Daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who placed her in a position to rule, Enheduanna lived about “1,500 years before Homer and about 500 years before the Biblical patriarch Abraham.” (There’s considerable doubt, of course, about whether either of those people existed, whether they wrote the works attributed to them, or whether such works were penned by committee, so to speak.)

Sargon was also an author, having composed an autobiography, The Legend of Sargon, that “exerted a powerful influence over the Sumerians he sought to conquer,” notes Joshua J. Mark at the Ancient History Encyclopedia. But first, Enheduanna used her position as high priestess to unify her father’s empire with religious hymns that praised the gods of each major Sumerian city. “In her writing, she humanized the once aloof gods,” just as Homer would hundreds of years later. “Now they suffered, fought, loved, and responded to human pleading.”

Her hymns to Inanna are her most defining literary achievement, but Enheduanna has somehow been completely left out of history. “We know who the first novelist is,” writes Charles Halton at Lit Hub, “eleventh century Japanese Noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the Tale of Genji.” Likewise, we know the first novelist of the western world, Miguel de Cervantes, and the first essayist, Michel de Montaigne. But “ask any person in your life who wrote the first poem and they’re apt to draw a blank.”

Maybe this is because, unlike novels, we don’t think of poetry as being invented by a single individual. It seems as though it must have sprung from the collective psyche not long after humans began using language. Yet from the point of view of literary history—which, like most histories, consists of a succession of great names—Enheduanna certainly deserves the honor as the world’s first known poet and first known author. Learn more about her in the lesson above.

Watch a 4000-Year Old Babylonian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Harvard

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

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

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

The “Feynman Technique” for Studying Effectively: An Animated Primer

in Education, Physics, Productivity, Science | March 24th, 2020

After winning the Nobel Prize, physicist Max Planck “went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, ‘Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine, if I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?’ Planck said, ‘Why not?’ And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, ‘Well, I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.’ ”

That this intellectual switcheroo never actually happened didn’t stop Charlie Munger from using it as an opener for a commencement speech to USC’s Law School. But when a successful billionaire investor finds value even in an admittedly “apocryphal story,” most of us will find value in it as well. It illustrates, according to the Freedom in Thought video above, the difference between “two kinds of knowledge: the deep knowledge that Max had, and the shallow knowledge that the chauffeur had.” Both forms of knowledge have their advantages, especially since none of us have lifetime enough to understand everything deeply. But we get in trouble when we can’t tell them apart: “We risk fooling ourselves into thinking we actually understand or know something when we don’t. Even worse, we risk taking action on misinformation or misunderstanding.”

Even if you put little stock into a made-up anecdote about one Nobel-winning physicist, surely you’ll believe the documented words of another. Richard Feynman once articulated a first principle of knowing as follows: “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” This principle underlies a practical process of learning that consists of four steps. First, “explain the topic out loud to a peer who is unfamiliar with the topic. Meet them at their level of understanding and use the simplest language you can.” Second, “identify any gaps in your own understanding, or points where you feel that you can’t explain an idea simply.” Third, “go back to the source material and study up on your weak points until you can use simple language to explain it.” Finally, “repeat the three steps above until you’ve mastered the topic.”

We’ve featured the so-called “Feynman technique” once or twice before here on Open Culture, but its emphasis on simplicity and concision always bears repeating — in, of course, as simple and concise a manner as possible each time. Its origins lie in not just Fenyman’s first principle of knowledge but his intellectual habits. This video’s narrator cites James Gleick’s biography Genius, which tells of how “Richard would create a journal for the things he did not know. His discipline in challenging his own understanding made him a genius and a brilliant scientist.” Like all of us, Feynman was ignorant all his life of vastly more subjects than he had mastered. But unlike many of us, his desire to know burned so furiously that it propelled him into perpetual confrontation with his own ignorance. We can’t learn what we want to know, after all, unless we acknowledge how much we don’t know.

Richard Feynman’s Technique for Learning Something New: An Animated Introduction

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Is Now Completely Online

The Cornell Note-Taking System: Learn the Method Students Have Used to Enhance Their Learning Since the 1940s

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

Japanese Artist Has Drawn Every Meal He’s Eaten for 32 Years: Behold the Delicious Illustrations of Itsuo Kobayashi

in Art, Food & Drink | March 24th, 2020

Since the 1980s, Itsuo Kobayashi has drawn a picture of every single meal he eats. However notable we find this practice now, it would surely have struck us as downright eccentric back then. Kobayashi began drawing his food before the arrival of inexpensive digital cameras and cellphones, and well before the smartphone combined the two into the single package we now keep close at hand. We all know people who take camera-phone pictures of their meals, some of them with the regularity and solemnity of prayer, but how many of them could produce lifelike renderings of the food placed before them with only pen and paper?

“The Japanese outsider artist and professional cook, born in 1962, first began keeping food diaries as a teenager,” Artnet’s Sarah Cascone writes of Kobayashi. “In his 20s, he began adding illustrations of the dishes he made at work, and those he ate while dining out.” When, at the age of 46, a “debilitating neurological disorder made it difficult for him to walk, leaving him largely confined to his home,” Kobayashi began to focus on his food diaries even more intensely.

His subjects are now mostly “food deliveries — sometimes from restaurants, sometimes from his mother. And though his day-to-day existence rarely varies, he’s been pushing his practice in a new direction, creating a new series of pop-up paintings.”

After 32 years of making increasingly detailed and realistic overhead drawings of his every meal — including such information as names, prices, flavor notes, and faithfully replicated restaurant logos — Kobayashi’s work has caught the attention of the American art world. The Fukuyama-based gallery Kushino Terrace “gave Kobayashi his US debut in January, at New York’s Outsider Art Fair,” Cascone writes. “His works sell for between $500 and $3,000.” That makes for quite a step up in prestige from his old job cooking at a soba restaurant, though his copious experience with that dish shows whenever it appears in his diary.

But then, after decade upon decade of daily practice, everything Kobayashi draws looks good enough to eat, from bowls of ramen to plates of curry to bento boxes filled with all manner of delights from land and sea. Though hardly fancy, especially by the advanced standards of Japanese food culture, these are the kind of meals you want to savor, the ones to which you feel you should pay appreciative attention rather than just scarfing down. Or at least they look that way under Kobayashi’s gaze, which even the most ardent 21st-century food-photographing hobbyist must envy. Many of us wish to eat more consciously, and the work of this cook-turned-artist shows us how: put down the phone, and pick up the sketchbook.

via Artnet

Wagashi: Peruse a Digitized, Centuries-Old Catalogue of Traditional Japanese Candies

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

How to Make Sushi: Free Video Lessons from a Master Sushi Chef

How the Astonishing Sushi Scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Was Animated: A Time-Lapse of the Month-Long Shoot

The Proper Way to Eat Ramen: A Meditation from the Classic Japanese Comedy Tampopo (1985)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Digital Archives Give You Free Access to Thousands of Historical Children’s Books

in Books | March 23rd, 2020

It is no arbitrary coincidence that Margery Williams’ classic The Velveteen Rabbit involves a terrifying brush with scarlet fever. Published in 1922, the book was based on her own children. But all of its first readers would have shuddered at the mention, given very recent memories of the global devastation wrought by “Spanish” flu. The story earns its fairy-tale ending by invoking catastrophe, with images of the poor rabbit nearly thrown into the fire and then tossed out with the trash.

The Velveteen Rabbit recalls Oscar Wilde’s 19th century children’s stories, in which “loss is not a pose; it is real,” writes Jeanette Winterson. All may eventually be restored, “there is usually a happy ending,” but “Wilde’s fairytale transformations turn on loss.” The author of The Velveteen Rabbit did not share Wilde’s contrarian streak, nor indulge the same sentimental fits of piety, but Williams’ intent was no less profound and serious. The specter of fever still haunts the book’s Arcadian ending.

Williams’ major influence was Walter de la Mare, whom the Poetry Foundation describes as a writer of “dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent”—all themes The Velveteen Rabbit engages in the narrative language of kids. Do children’s books still recognize early childhood as uniquely formative, while also regarding children as sophisticated readers who can appreciate emotional depth and psychological complexity?

Do Disney’s modern franchises take loss as seriously? What about Paw Patrol? Were Wilde and Williams’ stories unusual for their time or did they mark a trend? How do children’s books serve as codes of conduct, and what do they tell us about how we filter life’s calamities in digestible narratives for our kids? How can we use such stories to educate in the midst of overwhelming events?

For those who find these questions intriguing for purely academic reasons, or who struggle with them as both parents and newly minted homeschool teachers, we offer, below, several online libraries with thousands of scanned historical children’s books, from very early printed examples in the 18th century to examples of a much more recent vintage.

These come from publishers in England, the U.S., and the Soviet Union, and from names like Christina Rosetti, Jules Verne, Wizard of Oz author Frank L. Baum, and English artist Randolph Caldecott, whose surname has distinguished the best American picture books for 70 years. For every star of children’s writing and illustration, there are hundreds of writers and artists hardly anyone remembers, but whose work can be as playful, moving, and honest as the famous classic children’s stories we pass on to our kids.

Discover 6,000 new-old classics, and plenty of didactic manuals, alphabet books, and children’s devotional books, at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

Enter a digital archive of over 1,800 classic children’s books at the UCLA Children’s Book Collection, with books dating from 1728 to 1999

Marvel at the Library of Congress’s small but significant online collection of books from the 19th and 20th centuries

And, finally, at Princeton’s online collections, browse Soviet children’s books published between 1917 and 1953, for a very different view of early childhood education.

Whether we’re parents, scholars, teachers, curious readers, or all of the above, we find that the best children’s books show us “why we need fairy tales,” as Winterson writes, at every age. “Reason and logic are tools for understanding the world. We need a means of understanding ourselves, too. That is what imagination allows.”

200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & More

Watch Stars Read Classic Children’s Books: Betty White, James Earl Jones, Rita Moreno & Many More

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

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

Free Online Drawing Lessons for Kids, Led by Favorite Artists & Illustrators

in Art, Books, Creativity, K-12, Life | March 23rd, 2020

When I became the Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence, I didn’t realize the most impactful word in that title would be “Residence.” —illustrator Mo Willems

Even as schools regroup and online instruction gathers steam, the scramble continues to keep cooped-up kids engaged and happy.

These COVID-19-prompted online drawing lessons and activities might not hold much appeal for the single-minded sports nut or the junior Feynman who scoffs at the transformative properties of art, but for the art‑y kid, or fans of certain children’s illustrators, these are an excellent diversion.

Mo Willems, author of Knuffle Bunny and the Kennedy Center’s first Education Artist-in-Residence, is opening his home studio every weekday at 1pm EST for approximately twenty minutes worth of LUNCHDOODLES. Episode 5, finds him using a fat marker to doodle a Candyland-ish game board (sans treacle).

Once the design is complete, he rolls the dice to advance both his piece and that of his home viewer. A 5 lands him on the crowd-pleasing directive “fart.” Clearly the online instructor enjoys certain liberties the classroom teacher would be ill-advised to attempt.

Check out the full playlist on the Kennedy Center’s YouTube channel and download activity pages for each episode here.

#MoLunchDoodles

If the daily LUNCHDOODLES leaves ‘em wanting more, there’s just enough time for a quick pee and snack break before Lunch Lady’s Jarrett J. Krosoczka takes over with Draw Everyday with JJK, a basic illustration lesson every weekday at 2pm EST. These are a bit more nitty gritty, as JJK, the kid who loved to draw and grew up to be an artist, shares practical tips on penciling, inking, and drawing faces. Pro tip: resistant Star Wars fans will likely be hooked by the first episode’s Yoda, a character Krosoczka is well versed in as the author and illustrator of the Star Wars Jedi Academy series.

Find the complete playlist here.

Illustrator Carson Ellis eschews video lessons to host a Quarantine Art Club on her Instagram page. Her most recent assignment is cartography based challenge, with helpful tips for creating an “impactful page turn” for those who wish to share their creations on Instagram:

DRAW A MAP: When we think of treasure maps, we think of sea monsters, islands with palm trees, pirate ships, anthropomorphic clouds blowing gales upon white-capped seas. YOUR map can be of anywhere: an enchanted wood, a dystopian suburb, your backyard, your apartment that has never felt so small, all of the above, none of the above. Or your map can be a traditional treasure map leading to a pirate’s hoard. It’s totally up to you. Three things that you MUST include are: a compass rose (very important—look this up if you don’t know what it is), the name of the place you are mapping, and a red X.

DRAW THE TREASURE: The first part of this assignment is to draw a map with a red X to mark the location of hidden treasure. The second part of this assignment is to draw the treasure. I don’t know what the treasure is. Only you know what the treasure is. Draw it on a separate piece of paper from the map.

BONUS POINTS: If you’re going to post this on instagram, I recommend formatting it with two images. Post the map first, then the treasure which the viewer will swipe to see. This will create what we in the kids book world call AN IMPACTFUL PAGE TURN. That’s the thing that happens when you’re reading a picture book and you turn the page to discover something funny or surprising. It’s kind of hard to explain, but you know a good page turn when you’ve experienced one.

#QuarantineArtClub

Wendy McNaughton, who specializes in drawn journalism, also likes the Instagram platform, hosting a live Draw Together session every school day, from 10–10.30 am PST. Her approach is a bit more freeform, with impromptu dance parties, special guests, and field trips to the backyard.

Her How to Watch Draw Together highlight is a hilarious crash course in Instagram Live, scrawled in magic marker by someone who’s possibly only now just getting a grip on the platform. Don’t see it? Maybe it’s the weekend, or “maybe ask a millennial for help?”

#DrawTogether

And bless E.B. Goodale, an illustrator, first time author and mother of a young son, who having counteracted the heartbreak of a cancelled book tour with a hastily launched week of daily Instagram Live Toddler Drawing Club meetings, made the decision to scale back to just Tuesdays and Thursdays:

It was fun doing it everyday but turned out to be a bit too much to handle given our family’s new schedule. We’re all figuring it out, right? I hope you will continue to join me in our unchartered territory next week as we draw to stay sane. Tune in live to make requests or watch it later and follow along at home.

(Her How to Draw a Cat tutorial, above, was likely intended for in-person bookstore events relating to her just published Under the Lilacs…)

#drawingwithtoddlers

Our personal favorite is Stickies Art School, whose online children’s classes are led not by multi-disciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian, whose Facebook page serves as the online institution’s home, but rather her senior tuxedo cat, Stickies.

Stickies, who comes to the gig with an impressive command of English, honed no doubt by frequent appearances on Katchadourian’s Instagram page, affects a diffident air to dole out assignments, the latest of which is above.

He allows his students ample time to complete their tasks—thus far all portraits of himself. The next one, to render Stickies in a costume of the artist’s choice, is due Wednesday by 9am, Berlin time.

Stickies also offers positive feedback on submitted work in delightful follow up videos, a responsibility that Katchadourian takes seriously:

There have been so many conversations at NYU Gallatin where I’m on the faculty about online teaching, how to do it, how to think of a studio course in this new form, etc, and I think perhaps that crossed over with the desire to cheer up some people with kids, many of whom are already Stickies fans, or so I have been told.

His child proteges are no doubt unaware that Stickies looked ready to leave the planet several weeks ago, a fact whose import will resonate with many pet owners in these dark days:

Maybe a third element was just being so glad he is still around, that having him actively “out there” feels good and life-affirming at the moment.

Stickies Art School is marvelous fun for adults to audit from afar, via Katchadourian’s public Facebook posts. If you are a parent whose child would like to participate, send her a friend request and mention that you’re doing so on behalf of your child artist.

Searching on the hashtag #artteachersofinstagram will yield many more resources.

Art of Education University has singled out 12 accounts to get you started, as well as lots of helpful information for classroom art teachers who are figuring out how to teach effectively online.

Cartoonist Lynda Barry Teaches You How to Draw

How to Draw the Human Face & Head: A Free 3‑Hour Tutorial

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Given the cancellation of everything, she’s taken to Instagram to document her social distance strolls through New York City’s Central Park, using the hashtag #queenoftheapeswalk Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 43 ) |

When Orson Welles Crossed Paths With Hitler (and Churchill): “He Had No Personality.… I Think There Was Nothing There.”

in History, Television | March 23rd, 2020

Dick Cavett excelled at turning the late-night talk show format into a showcase for genuinely revealing conversations (and the occasional wrestling match). Of the many riveting guests he had on throughout the 60s and 70s, some appearing multiple times, few could match Orson Welles for sheer storytelling prowess. As if in a contest to outdo himself, Welles appeared on Cavett’s show three times in 1970, and once more in 1973, as an amiable, gruff raconteur who lived a life almost impossible to believe actually happened.

Welles met everyone. He even met Hitler, he says in the clip above from a July 1970 appearance on the show, his second that year. In those early days, he says, “the Nazis were just a very comical kind of minority party of nuts that nobody took seriously at all” except Welles’ Austrian hiking instructor, who brought the legendary actor and director to a Nazi dinner with the future mass-murdering dictator. Welles was seated next to Hitler, who “made so little an impression on me that I can’t remember a second of it. He had no personality. He was invisible…. I think there was nothing there.”

By 1938, everyone knew who he was: Hitler was named “man of the year” by Time magazine, who wrote, “lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the Führer”—and Welles was named “Radio’s Man of the Year.” His “famous The War of the Worlds broadcast, scared fewer people than Hitler,” the editors wrote, “but more than had ever been frightened by radio before, demonstrating that radio can be a tremendous force in whipping up mass emotion.” Welles’ never met Stalin, he tells Cavett, unprompted, but knew Roosevelt “very well.”

In a later appearance on the show, in September 1970, Welles claimed Roosevelt told him no one believed the Pearl Harbor announcement because of the War of the Worlds hoax. Here, in this twelve-minute clip from July, he has many more stories to tell and excellent questions from Cavett to answer (if he went back to school, he says, and “really wanted to get good at a subject,” he would study anthropology). Towards the end, at 9:00, he talks about another world leader who did make a distinct impression on him: Winston Churchill. “He was quite another thing,” says Welles. “He had great humor and great irony.”

Welles tells a story of Churchill coming to see him play Othello in London. “I heard a murmuring in the front row. I thought he was talking to himself.” Churchill later came to visit Welles in his dressing room and began to recite all of Othello’s lines from memory, “including the cuts which I had made.” Years later, after the war, when Churchill was out of office, Welles ran into him once more in Venice, and their prior association came very much in handy in the financing of his next picture. (He doesn’t name the film, but it might have been The Stranger.)

No one experienced the 20th century quite like Orson Welles, and no one left such a creative legacy. Always entertaining, his Cavett appearances are more than opportunities for name dropping—they’re televised memoirs, in extemporaneous vignettes, from one of history’s most engaging storytellers.

Orson Welles Trashes Famous Directors: Alfred Hitchcock (“Egotism and Laziness”), Woody Allen (“His Arrogance Is Unlimited”) & More

Alfred Hitchcock Talks with Dick Cavett About Sabotage, Foreign Correspondent & Laxatives (1972)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Take a Virtual Tour of 30 World-Class Museums & Safely Visit 2 Million Works of Fine Art

in Archives, Art | March 21st, 2020

Since the first stirrings of the internet, artists and curators have puzzled over what the fluidity of online space would do to the experience of viewing works of art. At a conference on the subject in 2001, Susan Hazan of the Israel Museum wondered whether there is “space for enchantment in a technological world?” She referred to Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the “potentially liberating phenomenon” of technologically reproduced art, yet also noted that “what was forfeited in this process were the ‘aura’ and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.” Evaluating a number of online galleries of the time, Hazan found that “the speed with which we are able to access remote museums and pull them up side by side on the screen is alarmingly immediate.” Perhaps the “accelerated mobility” of the internet, she worried, “causes objects to become disposable and to decline in significance.”

Fifteen years after her essay, the number of museums that have made their collections available online whole, or in part, has grown exponentially and shows no signs of slowing. We may not need to fear losing museums and libraries—important spaces that Michel Foucault called “heterotopias,” where linear, mundane time is interrupted. These spaces will likely always exist.

Yet increasingly we need never visit them in person to view most of their contents. Students and academics can conduct nearly all of their research through the internet, never having to travel to the Bodleian, the Beinecke, or the British Library. And lovers of art must no longer shell out for plane tickets and hotels to see the precious contents of the Getty, the Guggenheim, or the Rijksmuseum. And who would dare do that during our current pandemic?

For all that may be lost, online galleries have long been “making works of art widely available, introducing new forms of perception in film and photography and allowing art to move from private to public, from the elite to the masses.”

Even more so than when Hazan wrote those words, the online world offers possibilities for “the emergence of new cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.” Over the years we have featured dozens of databases, archives, and online galleries through which you might virtually experience art the world over, an experience once solely reserved for only the very wealthy. And as artists and curators adapt to a digital environment, they find new ways to make virtual galleries enchanting. The vast collections in the virtual galleries listed below await your visit, with 2,000,000+ paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, and more. See the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum (top), courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute. See Van Gogh’s many self-portraits and vivid, swirling landscapes at The Van Gogh Museum. Visit the Asian art collection at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. Or see Vassily Kandinsky’s dazzling abstract compositions at the Guggenheim.

And below the list of galleries, find links to online collections of several hundred art books to read online or download. Continue to watch this space: We’ll add to both of these lists as more and more collections come online.

Art Images from Museums & Libraries

Art Institute of Chicago (44,000 images)
Google Art Project (250,000)
Harvard Bauhaus Collection (30,000)
L.A. County Museum (20,000)
New York Public Library-Historic Maps (20,000)
Norway National Museum (30,000)
Paris Art Museums (300,000)
SFMoMA Rauschenberg Collection
Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center (45,000)
Stanford University’s French Revolution Collection (14,000)
Taipei’s National Palace Museum (70,000)
The British Library (100,000)
The British Museum (4,200)
The Cleveland Museum of Art (30,000)
The Isamu Noguchi Museum (60,000)
The Getty (100,000)
The Guggenheim (1,600)
The Met (400,000)
The Morgan Library & Museum’s Online Collection (10,000)
The Morgan Library Rembrandt Sketches (300)
The Museum of Modern Art/MoMA (65,000)
The Museum of New Zealand (30,000)
The National Gallery (35,000)
The New York Public Library: Photos, Maps, Letters (180,000)
The Rijksmuseum (210,00)
The Smithsonian (40,000)
The Tate (70,000)
The Whitney (21,000)
The Van Gogh Museum (3500)
Yale Center for British Art
Yale’s Great Depression Photo Collection (170,000)
Vermeer (36)

Art Books

The Getty (250 books)
The Guggenheim (98)
The Met (448)
Getty Research Portal (100,000)

Note: This post originally appeared on our site in May 2016. It has since been updated to include more art from different museums.

Related Contents:

Download 448 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Free: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

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

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

Dead & Company Announces Couch Tour, Letting You Stream Free Concerts at Home

in Music | March 21st, 2020

More free music/entertainment to carry you through these bleak, strange times. Dead & Company (the surviving members of the Grateful Dead plus John Mayer and Oteil Burbridge) are making concerts free to stream at home. And the first one gets underway tonight.

They announced on Twitter:

Stay at home this weekend and tune in to “One More Saturday Night”, a new #CouchTour series featuring your favorite Dead & Company shows, for FREE. We’re kicking things off with the 12/2/17 Austin show this Saturday at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT on nugs.tv and on Facebook!

Click the links above to watch the show. Until then, you can watch a set above, recorded live in Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheatre, back in June 2017.

Also find a trove of 11,000+ recorded Grateful Dead shows in the Relateds below.

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!

11,215 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive

The Grateful Dead Play at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978)

The Longest of the Grateful Dead’s Epic Long Jams: “Dark Star” (1972), “The Other One” (1972) and “Playing in The Band” (1974)

Bruce Springsteen Releases Live Concert Film Online: Watch “London Calling: Live In Hyde Park” and Practice Self Distancing

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Soothing, Uplifting Resources for Parents & Caregivers Stressed by the COVID-19 Crisis

in Film, Life, Music, Nature | March 20th, 2020

When COVID-19 closed schools and shuttered theaters and concert venues, response was swift.

Stars ranging from the Cincinnati zoo’s hippo Fiona to Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda leapt to share free content with suddenly homebound viewers.

Coldplay’s frontman, Chris Martin, separated from his bandmates by international borders, played a mini gig at home, as did country star Keith Urban, with his wife, Nicole Kidman, lurking in the background.

Choreographer Debbie Allen got people off the couch with free dance classes on Instagram.

Audible pledged to provide free audiobooks for little kids and teens for the duration.

An embarrassment of riches for those whose experience of COVID-19 is somewhere between extended snow day and staycation…

But what about caregivers who suddenly find themselves providing 24–7 care for elders with dementia, or neuro-atypical adult children whose upended routine is wreaking havoc on their emotions?

“I know people are happy that the schools have closed but I just lost critical workday hours and if/when day hab closes I will have to take low-paid medical leave AND we will not have any breaks from caregiving someone with 24–7 needs and aggressive, loud behaviors. I feel completely defeated,” one friend writes.

24 hours later:

We just lost day hab, effective tomorrow. My messages for in-home services haven’t been returned yet. Full on panic mode.

What can we do to help lighten those loads when we’re barred from physical interaction, or entering each other’s homes?

We combed through our archive, with an eye toward the most soothing, uplifting content, appropriate for all ages, starting with pianist Paul Barton’s classical concerts for elephants in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, above.

Calming videos:

Hours of soothing nature footage from the BBC.

Commuters in Newcastle’s Haymarket Bus Station Playing Beethoven

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour’s Musical Take on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Guided Imagery Meditation from Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital

Four classic performances from the “Father of Bossa Nova” João Gilberto

The Insects’ Christmas, a 1913: Stop Motion Animation

Multiple seasons of Bob Ross!

60+ Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online

Homemade American Music, a 1980 documentary on rural southeastern traditional music and musicians

Winsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur

Calming Music and Audio:

Metallica, REM, Led Zeppelin & Queen Sung in the Style of Gregorian Chant

18 Hours of Free Guided Meditations

Weightless, the most relaxing song ever made

Calming Piano, Jazz & Harp Covers of Music from Hayao Miyazaki Films

240 Hours of Relaxing, Sleep-Inducing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Runner to Star Wars

Simon & Garfunkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release

We’ve also got a trove of free coloring books and pages, though caregivers should vet the content before sharing it with someone who’s likely to be disturbed by medical illustration and images of medieval demons…

Readers, if you know a resource that might buy caregivers and their agitated, housebound charges a bit of peace, please add it in the comments below.

Free Guided Imagery Recordings Help Kids Cope with Pain, Stress & Anxiety

Chill Out to 70 Hours of Oceanscape Nature Videos Filmed by BBC Earth

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Short, Animated Film Shows How a Scientific Article Gets Published: “Excitement, Baby Steps and Reams of Rejections”

in Science | March 20th, 2020

When people say things like “the science is settled” or “the science has changed,” researchers tend to grind their teeth. Science can come to a broad consensus, as in the case of the coronavirus or climate change, but it isn’t ever perfectly settled as a bloc on any question. We proceed in scientific knowledge not by attaining perfect knowledge but, as Isaac Asimov once wrote, by being less wrong than those who came before.

And scientists advance in scientific publishing, as Aeon writes, not with certainty, but with “excitement, baby steps and reams of rejections.” As we see in the short film above, The Researcher’s Article, by French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, getting one’s research published can be “a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting,” demonstrated here by the travails of physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff of the University of Paris-Saclay.

Even before submitting their findings, the scientists must carefully fit their work into the traditional form known as the “letter,” a document of four pages or fewer that condenses years of research into strictly succinct paragraphs, graphs, and references. The “letter” is “one of the most popular formats of articles in physics,” say the physicists, noting the major Nobel prize-winning discoveries to appear as letters in recent years, including the Higgs’ Boson publication that won in 2013, coming in at only two pages long.

Summing up “a massive amount of data,” short scientific articles then go on to prove themselves to their respective fields through a refereeing process in which three anonymous scientists read the work and recommend publication, revision, or rejection. This process can go several rounds and take several months. One must be persistent: Restagno and Bobroff were rejected from several journals before finally getting an acceptance.

After this significant investment of time and effort, the authors may have a readership of maybe twenty people. But crowd size is not the point, they say, “because research is made up of all these small discoveries,” contributing to a larger picture, informing and correcting each other, and going about the humble, painstaking business of trying to be less wrong than their predecessors, while still building on the best insights of hundreds of years of scientific publishing.

via Aeon

The Shortest-Known Paper Published in a Serious Math Journal: Two Succinct Sentences

The Emperor of Japan, Akihito, Is Still Publishing Scientific Papers in His 80s

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

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

Watch Curated Playlists of Experimental Videos & Films to Get You Through COVID-19: Miranda July, Jan Švankmajer, Guy Maddin & More

Meet the World’s First Known Author: Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

The “Feynman Technique” for Studying Effectively: An Animated Primer

Japanese Artist Has Drawn Every Meal He’s Eaten for 32 Years: Behold the Delicious Illustrations of Itsuo Kobayashi

Digital Archives Give You Free Access to Thousands of Historical Children’s Books

Free Online Drawing Lessons for Kids, Led by Favorite Artists & Illustrators

When Orson Welles Crossed Paths With Hitler (and Churchill): “He Had No Personality.… I Think There Was Nothing There.”

Take a Virtual Tour of 30 World-Class Museums & Safely Visit 2 Million Works of Fine Art

Dead & Company Announces Couch Tour, Letting You Stream Free Concerts at Home

Soothing, Uplifting Resources for Parents & Caregivers Stressed by the COVID-19 Crisis

A Short, Animated Film Shows How a Scientific Article Gets Published: “Excitement, Baby Steps and Reams of Rejections”

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search