The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Comments Off
Romance and realism are mixed together in surprising and unforgettable ways in Jacques Demy’s 1964 masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. At first glance the film appears to be another piece of escapist fluff—a brightly colored musical about a beautiful girl who falls in love with a handsome young man. But as the story unfolds, [...]
≡ Category: Art, Film, Television | ≅ 2 Comments
Don’t visit Vintage ToonCast (or its iTunes channel) at the beginning of a busy workday. You’ll start by promising yourself to watch just one, like, say, “The Wabbit Who Came to Supper,” which we posted above. But then, of course, you’ll want to check out the famous Betty Boop episode, “Minnie the Moocher,” featuring Cab [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
The culture wars wage on. Almost twenty years after the great Murphy Brown debate, we’re still going at it. But now, instead of debating the pros and cons of single motherhood, the focus has turned to whether Michelle Obama erred in inviting the rapper Common to the White House Poetry Night last week. (See his actual [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Nick Risinger, an amateur astronomer from Seattle, quit his day job last year, packed his bags and cameras, and began a 60,000 mile journey, moving across the American West and down to the western Cape of South Africa (twice). His voyage would end with a 5000-megapixel photograph of the entire night sky, produced from 37,440 separate exposures, and [...]
≡ Category: Books, Comedy, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
What can we say about Gary Shteyngart? The novelist appeared last year in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue (which listed authors “who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.”) He teaches writing at Columbia University and counts James Franco as one of his students. And he’s willing to hustle a [...]
≡ Category: Art, Film | ≅ 2 Comments
Over at Metafilter, Kári Tulinius has a posted a nice selection of experimental short films by the great Japanese animator and manga artist Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka died in 1989, and although he’s most famous in the US for children’s cartoons like Astro-Boy and Kimbo the White Lion (better known to everyone but the Walt Disney Company’s lawyers as [...]
≡ Category: Life, Music | ≅ 2 Comments
Playing in Toronto last week, Paul Simon did something, well, awesome. A fan asks him to play “Duncan,” his 1972 classic, and lets him know that she learned to play guitar to that song. So Simon agrees. And, even better, he invites her on stage to take over guitar and vocals. Nervous, almost hyperventilating, she [...]
≡ Category: Deals | ≅ Leave a Comment
Worth a quick fyi. The Teaching Company just introduced a new way to access their courses – Video Downloads. And now, for one day, you can download these video courses at a steep discount. If you’re not familiar with them, The Teaching Company travels across the US, recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Music | ≅ 5 Comments
Just last month, Bob Dylan played his first concert in China at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing. It wasn’t exactly a big show. Roughly 2,000 people attended, but it became a big affair at home when NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a caustic op-ed, accusing Dylan of playing a censored set stripped of his revolutionary [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
There is no exact date for this silent home movie shot at the Reseda, CA home of Stan Laurel‘s daughter, Lois. But the year must have been 1956, because, during that year, Oliver Hardy, the other member of the great comic duo, lost more than 150 pounds, resulting in a complete change of his outward appearance. Hardy had [...]
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