What’s more to say than Coldplay performed this tribute to Adam Yauch, the dearly departed Beastie Boy, Friday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Last fall, they also performed a three song set at Steve Jobs’ memorial service, which means they’re unfortunately getting a little too practiced at this. This video comes our way via Devour.
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Last week NASA released Pursuit of Light, a short HD film that uses amazing data visualizations (mixed with live action footage) to tell stories about the Earth, The Moon, The Sun, The Planets, and the Deep Sky. And it’s all “wrapped in poetic implication about humanity’s need to explore,” says the film’s producer. Pursuit of Light will appear on Hyperwalls around the country, a new screen technology created by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. But you can watch it first on the web, or freely download it here. H/T Metafilter
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Shortly after Apple aired its famous Ridley Scott Super Bowl commercial in 1984, the upstart company knocked off a cheap World War II-themed internal video — a rally-the-troops film — dubbed 1944. The cause is freedom and the mission, to save the world from bad computing. The enemy isn’t the Axis (Germany, Japan, Italy.) It’s IBM and its “big blue mono-blob.” And the commander in chief? It’s Steve Jobs, of course, channeling F.D.R. at roughly the 5:30 mark (find the isolated cameo below).
To be sure, there’s an historical quality to this film. It offers a visual reminder of how Apple positioned itself against IBM before Microsoft came along. (Walter Isaacson drives home that point in his recent biography of Steve Jobs, which you can download from Audible if you sign up for a free trial.) But there’s also something more timeless about the film. It just goes to show that every company, no matter how much they think different, can revel in the same corporate gimmicks — the schwag, the fawning inside jokes and the rest. Poof, there goes my chance to work at Apple one day.
via Apple Insider
How to explain Henry Rollins to someone who doesn’t know his work? Twenty years ago, you could’ve just called him a musician, the guy who used to sing with Black Flag. At that point he had moved on to front his own band, one which also showcased the personality that routinely drives journalists through their synonyms for “intense.” Having sworn off singing, Rollins these days concentrates on column writing, television hosting, radio broadcasting, and politically charged spoken-word performing. (You can watch him participate in a live reading of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King here.) His personality remains in full effect and, unencumbered by early punk rock’s demand for emotional bluntness, he now projects a more complicated, harder-to-caricature image. He still seems driven by seething anger at society’s shortcomings, but his current middle-aged mixture of rage and benevolence (though sometimes unsettling in its own way) avoids the raw aggression with which music history has associated him.
Rollins seemingly never swallowed punk’s youthful nihilism, but now, in full maturity, he sometimes sounds downright motivational. Case in point: his “Letter to a Young American” from Big Think, a warning about the debilitating effects of feeling spite toward the privileged. “You will encounter people who never have to pay in full,” he says. “They get to wreck the room and never have to clean it. They can get all the way through high school and never understand where a dollar comes from, because they just get it given to them.” While acknowledging the existence of such people, often in positions of power, Rollins recommends the strategy of ignoring them: “You cannot let these people make you feel that you have in any way been dwarfed or outclassed. You must really go for your own and realize how short life is. You got what you got, so you’ve got to make the most of it. You really can’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about his.” Like or dislike the Henry Rollins persona, how often have you seen a high-profile activist take such a firm stand against resentment? A transcript for his “Letter to a Young American” can be found here.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Richard Dawkins needs no introduction. Lawrence Krauss barely needs an introduction — although we’ll tell you that he’s a leading voice in theoretical physics and the author of the recent book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. (We recommend watching this lecture to get familiar with his work.) In February, the two scientists met up at Arizona State University and spent two hours in a freewheeling conversation, touching on evolution, cosmology, religion, and other topics. They spoke before a packed house, but Shirley Films was good enough to post the video online, and you can watch it above. Another conversation — this one recorded at The Australian National University on 10 April 2012 — can be viewed here.
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Last month we reported on Yale’s addition of seven new online courses to its growing roster of free offerings. Now we’ve learned that Yale is inaugurating a new series of books based on its popular open courses.
“It may seem counterintuitive for a digital project to move into books and e‑books, because these are a much more conventional way of publishing,” Open Yale Courses founding project director Diana E.E. Kleiner told The Chronicle of Higher Education last week. But the books are in keeping with Open Yale’s mission of “reaching out in every way that we could.”
Yale University Press is bringing out the first six titles this year. The paperbacks are priced at roughly $12 on Amazon, with e‑book editions going for closer to $10. The first three volumes–Theory of Literature by Paul H. Fry, New Testament History and Literature by Dale B. Martin, and Death by Shelly Kagan–are available now, while three additional titles–The Moral Foundations of Politics by Ian Shapiro, Introduction to the Bible by Christine Hayes, and Political Philosophy by Steven B. Smith–will be published later this year. The publisher says the books are “designed to bring the depth and breadth of a Yale education to a wide variety of readers.”
For more open education resources, take a moment to explore our collection of 450 free online courses from top universities.
By now you’ve heard the news. Beastie Boys co-founder Adam Yauch has died at the age of 47. The cause, salivary cancer. The Beastie Boys broke onto the national scene in 1986, with the release of Licensed to Ill, which became the best-selling rap album of the 1980s and the first hip hop LP to top the Billboard chart. Either then or some time since, you’ve likely heard their best known song from the album — (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!).
The original music video for the song (below) became something of an MTV mainstay and played on themes from George A. Romero’s zombie movie Dawn of the Dead. 25 years later, Adam Yauch produced Fight For Your Right Revisited, a 30 minute surreal film that picks up where the original video left off. It stars Elijah Wood, Danny McBride and Seth Rogen. You can watch it above in full. It’s also added to our meta collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
via Mubi.com
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How do you fight propaganda? With propaganda, or so held the British wartime school of thought. “Over 120 films were produced as ‘cultural propaganda’ to counteract anything the Nazis might throw out and to refute the idea that ours was a country stuck in the past. These films were designed to showcase Britain to the rest of the world, at a time when Britain itself was under attack.” These words come from the about page of the British Council Film Collection, a newly opened internet archive of over 120 such pieces of cultural propaganda, free for the viewing. Above, you’ll find 1941’s City Bound, as direct an illustration of the legendary stiff upper lip as you’ll find in this digital vault. The reel trumpets, in its sober manner, the unblinking efficiency of London Transport as it ferries workers into the city center each morning and disgorges them back into the suburbs each night, even amid the falling bombs of the Blitz. And if you find these sternly proud shots of commuter trains and buses rolling bang on time from their stations a bit artificial, remember that the Council still had to produce the film itself under the very real threat from above.
These productions “provide us with a unique insight,” says the Council today, “not necessarily into how Britain actually was, but more into how Britain once wanted to be perceived by the rest of the world.” Anyone interested in national branding, vintage boosterism, and subjective history can have a field day indulging their fascinations in these meta-qualities, but many of these short documentaries offer legitimately worthwhile first-order information as well. Consider the above, Architects of England. Yes, it came into being to showcase the splendid ingenuity of English building from Stonehenge monumental to industrial modernist, but for a spirited twelve-minute grounding in British architectural traditions, you could do worse. If you remain unconvinced of the value of any of this, bear in mind that you can easily download anything in the British Council Film Collection. If you need the makings of, say, an ironic music video, look no further.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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