The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: History, Technology | ≅ 3 Comments
On January 27, 1994, the Today Show ran a hilarious segment trying to unravel this crazy new thing called “The Internet.” A year later, however, it looks like the media had it all figured out. Check out this 1995 MTV trend piece by Kurt Loder: We got a kick out of the clunkiess of the [...]
≡ Category: Film, Psychology | ≅ 11 Comments
According this fascinating piece in The Smithsonian, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 weepfest The Champ is the most consistently effective tearjerker in the history of film. It’s also the tearjerker most often used in scientific studies of grief and sadness: The Champ has been used in experiments to see if depressed people are more likely to cry than non-depressed people [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 1 Comment
Good luck staying dry-eyed through this moving tribute to Jim Henson, which features a group of puppets trying to cope with the death of their beloved creator. It’s a long time since we’ve seen the so-called stages of grief dramatized so beautifully and with such economy. (The filmmakers recently followed up their 5-minute short with [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
A few weeks ago, we posted New York Times critic A.O.Scott’s thoughtful three-minute look back at the surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou. The 1929 Buñuel/Dalà production may well be the world’s most famous bit of early surrealist cinema, but it was not the first. That honor goes to another very strange (and indubitably surreal) short film [...]
≡ Category: Art, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 1 Comment
Lucian Freud, distinguished artist and grandson of Sigmund Freud, died yesterday at the age of 88. The painter was best known for his contributions to figurative art and his uncompromising portraits, which The New York Times has collected in an impressive online gallery. Freud was also known for his rigorous (some would say cruel) demands on his [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
As if your Twitter, Google +, and RSS feeds weren’t overwhelming enough, you can now watch a time lapse video of a year’s worth of The New York Times — in 12,000 screenshots. Enjoy, and try not get dizzy. via Gizmodo Related Content: Gay Talese: Drinking at New York Times Put Mad Men to Shame Hard [...]
≡ Category: Film, Music, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 1 Comment
Being John Malkovich director and longtime Beastie Boys collaborator Spike Jonze has directed yet another music video for the band: A high-concept sci-fi extravaganza that features zombies, GI Joe action figures, and, as usual, a soundtrack with a pretty decent hook. The song is called “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” and the [...]
≡ Category: Film, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6974132[/vimeo] Rob Shaw’s dark animated short The Machine was voted Best Film at last week’s Robot Film Festival in New York City.  The movie starts on what looks like a standard boy-makes-machine, machine-runs-amok, boy-kills-machine trajectory, but veers nicely off-course and ends on a note much more Sartre than Terminator. (Battlestar Galactica fans will see the twist coming from a mile [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Science, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
In his 2007 New Yorker essay on performance artist Chris Burden, the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that most of Burden’s oeuvre consisted of “powerful works that deal ingeniously with aesthetics and ethics of power.” Schjeldhal added that “you needn’t like them to be impressed,” and then described some of Burden’s more infamous pieces: He spent five days in [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 2 Comments
Kudos to How to be A Retronaut for finding this great clip of Jack Kerouac playing pool in early 1967. We bet he was the coolest player in that particular room (at the Pawtucketville Social Club, in Lowell, Mass). But we’d also bet that he copied that cool, taut persona from Paul Newman’s turn as “Fast [...]
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