The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
In the mid-1950s, the American composer Leonard Bernstein made several appearances on Omnibus, a television show dedicated to covering the sciences, arts and humanities. During his visits, Bernstein walked audiences through the art of making music. Take for example the clip above where he breaks down the making of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Just how did Beethoven [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
What’s My Line? aired on CBS from 1950 to 1967, making it the longest-running game show in American television history. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured hundreds of celebrities, including some of America’s leading cultural figures. The clip above dusts off the 1960 appearance made by Carl Sandburg, the poet, writer, and three time [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ 2 Comments
Rod Serling, the American screenwriter & television producer best known for The Twilight Zone (watch full episodes here), fielded questions from students about the whole art of writing for television. In the clip above, he gives a rather dramatic response to the question, “Where do ideas come from?” (They come from the Earth… They’re in [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Today, Clicker.com comes out of beta and promises to become the complete guide to Internet Television. Currently, the site “contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.” The content (all apparently legal) is generally supplied by other content [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Life, Television | ≅ 7 Comments
David Simon once called his HBO series, The Wire, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” Think of it as a five season, 3600 minute, artistic depiction of the escalating breakdown of urban society. The show is art. But it is also life in the biggest sense. And it’s why some thinkers have likened [...]
≡ Category: Science, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, Botany of Desire, is now a film, and you can watch it online, courtesy of PBS. (Click to watch complete film.) The film takes you inside our relationship with the plant world, and shows “how four familiar species — the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato — evolved to satisfy [...]
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ 3 Comments
A little birthday present. John Lennon would have been 69 years old today. This memorable interview, recorded in 1971, features John and Yoko in a candid, relaxed and wide-ranging conversation with one of America’s leading talk show hosts at the time. To watch the full interview, see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, [...]
≡ Category: Education, Media, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
News from the Wired Campus Blog:
PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online.
Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s take on calculating happiness in a lecture called “How to [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ 3 Comments
Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of The Twilight Zone’s debut on American television, a big occasion for fans of sci-fi, horror and suspense. To celebrate the anniversary, TV Squad pulled together a list of the 10 best episodes of Rod Serling’s show. At the top, you might put the episode called “Eye of the [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Thanks to Duke University, you can now access a digital archive of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Eventually, this collection will feature close to 12,000 digitized commercials, and it will let you see how America’s traditional brands (IBM, Maxwell House, American Express, Avis, etc) evolved through the medium of mainstream commercial [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you’ve watched The Wire, you know him as Jimmy McNulty, the smart, boozing Baltimore cop that likes an occasional romp and goes rogue here and there. Now, here’s your chance to see another side of Dominic, the side that’s more at home, at least geographically speaking. Here we have, as Ed tells us, the [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
As many may now know, David Carradine was found dead this morning in Thailand. Above, we feature him acting in the popular 1970’s television series Kung Fu. ”In this clip from the pilot episode of Kung Fu, Caine (David Carradine) is discussing life with a fellow expatriate. Their discussion touches on the unity of opposites, which is symbolised [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
Above, we feature Frank Lloyd Wright, who appeared on What’s My Line?, America’s longest-running game show, back in June 1956. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured many cultural VIPs, including Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, Groucho Marx, Carl Sandburg and others.
Along similar lines, it’s worth noting that YouTube now hosts a series of old-time television shows. Within this [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasury of down-under video 100 years in the making. In a partnership with the major networks and other learning organizations, the Archive has commissioned expert curators to annotate the holdings, which provides for a rich [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Here Bill Moyers sits down with David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, the stunning HBO production. As anyone who has watched the show knows, The Wire is not just a splendid drama. It is, as Simon has once called it, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” It takes a penetrating and aesthetically rich [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
A light (and, for me, nostalgic) way to ease into the weekend…
Over at Marvel.com, they’re streaming episodes from the original Spider-Man TV series that hit the airwaves back in 1967. A new episode will be posted every Thursday. Above, you’ll find Episode 1, and see where it all began.
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≡ Category: Literature, Philosophy, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but I found this footage intriguing. Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Above, you can watch Orson Welles’ last interview and public appearance. The clip brings you back to October 10, 1985, when the great filmmaker, then 70 years old, appeared on the Merv Griffin show and talked a good deal about aging and his aging generation. Just two hours later, Welles would die of a heart [...]
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ 3 Comments
As you’ll recall, we mentioned a few days ago that Bob Dylan allowed “Blowin’ in the Wind” to be used in a British commercial. Never before had Dylan allowed that to happen, at least in Britain. For one of our readers, there was a small silver lining. The company using the classic song (the Co-operative [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
On the lighter side for a sleepy Sunday ….
“The Big Snooze” (1946) was the last cartoon that animation director Bob Clampett ever worked on for Warner Brothers. The title? It’s an obvious play on the Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep, which was also turned into a film (starring Bogart and Bacall) in 1946. And the sleeping [...]
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