The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Life, Music | ≅ 2 Comments
Pickin’ & Trimmin’ is a documentary short film from 2008 profiling “The Barbershop” in Drexel, North Carolina, where Lawrence Anthony and David Shirley have barbered for decades, and where bluegrass musicians have jammed in the back room every weekend. Directed by Matt Morris, the award-winning film showcases the people and atmosphere of a small community in rural [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 3 Comments
Before the days of Harry Potter, generations of young readers let their imaginations take flight with The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven fantasy novels written by C. S. Lewis. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis served on the English faculty at Oxford University and took part in the Inklings, an Oxford literary group dedicated to fiction and [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
They call Paris the City of Love. It’s also the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade. Behind the romantic postcard facade, there’s something a bit more complicated going on. In Tuileries, a short film by Joel and Ethan Coen from the 2006 anthology, Paris Je T’Aime, Steve Buscemi plays a mild-mannered tourist caught completely out of his [...]
≡ Category: Life, Politics, Religion | ≅ 4 Comments
18 months after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, the polemical writer Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62. His fans began to fear the worst last month when Hitchens, suddenly hospitalized with pneumonia, couldn’t attend a widely-publicized debate in London. The promoters of the event, Intelligence², quickly turned the debate into a celebration of Hitchens’ life. [...]
Today is the birthday of the Russian abstract painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky. He was born in Moscow on December 16, 1866 (December 4 on the Julian calendar), and raised in Odessa, where he took an early interest in music. As a young man he studied economics and law, but in 1895 his life [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s hard to imagine The Godfather, the iconic 1972 film, without Marlon Brando. But that’s almost how it turned out. During casting, Paramount executives originally pushed for Laurence Olivier. But when he couldn’t take the film, and when the director, Francis Ford Coppola, asked them to consider Brando, they initially responded: “Marlon Brando will never [...]
≡ Category: MIT, Physics, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Think of it as the ultimate slow-motion movie camera. Researchers at M.I.T. have developed an imaging system so fast it can trace the motion of pulses of light as they travel through liquids and solids. To put it into perspective, writes John Markoff in The New York Times, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion [...]
These days, you can take a virtual tour of paintings at the MoMA, Met, Uffizi Gallery, Hermitage, Rijksmuseum, and National Gallery and other major museums, thanks to Google’s Art Project. And don’t forget the Sistine Chapel and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now let’s add one more to the list — a panoramic virtual tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. You can [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film | ≅ 1 Comment
In 2005, the Sundance Channel aired Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, a 52 minute documentary that pays homage to George Whitman, the American founder of the most famous independent bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company. Whitman died yesterday, at age 98, in his apartment above the store. Sylvia Beach first opened a [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
The American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992) composed 4′33,″ a three-movement composition for any instrument, in 1952. It was Cage’s most famous and controversial piece, a four-and-a-half minute reflection on the sound of silence, on the sounds you hear when the music goes silent and the attention shifts to the audience in the concert hall. [...]
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