The 2011 video, Sense of Flying (below), gave viewers a remarkable look at Espen Fadnes flying down mountain sides at speeds of 155 miles per hour. If you saw the video along with 2.5 million others, you perhaps wondered: What could be going through this guy’s head? Well, now is your chance to find out. A newly-released video, Split of a Second (above), gets into the psyche and motivation of the Norwegian Wingsuit World Champion. It also shows the extent to which this guy really lives on a razor’s edge. Strap yourself in. Put on your crash helmet. And enjoy the ride.
What, you haven’t seen Nosferatu yet? But you’re in luck: not only do you still have a few days left to fit this seminal classic of vampiric cinema into your Halloween viewing rotation, but when the 31st comes, you can watch it free online yet again. An inspiration for countless vampire films that would follow over the next ninety years, F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent feature adapts Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but just loosely enough so that it could put its own stamp on the myth and not actually have to pay for rights to the novel. Jonathan and Mina Harker? Now Thomas and Ellen Hutter. Jonathan’s boss Renfield? Now a fellow named Knock. Count Dracula, to whose vast and crumbling estate Renfield sends the hapless Jonathan? Now Count Orlok — and unforgettably so. We can post no more relevant endorsement of Nosferatu’s enduring value than to say that it remains scary, or at least eerie, to this day. I defy any sophisticated modern viewer to spend All Hallows’ eve with this picture and not come away feeling faintly unsettled.
Part of it has to do with sheer age: while some visual effects haven’t held up — get a load of Orlok escaping his coffin in the ship’s cargo hold, employing a technique trusted by every nine-year-old with a video camera — the deeply worn look and feel seems, at moments, to mark the film as coming from a distant past when aristocratic blood-sucking living corpses may as well have existed.
This same process has, over four decades, imbued with a patina of menace every horror film made in the seventies. Fans of the 1979 Werner Herzog-Klaus Kinski collaborationNosferatu the Vampyre, a companion piece obviously worth viewing in any case, can attest to this. You might also consider incorporating in your Halloween night viewing E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, a satire of the 1920s film industry’s collision of eccentric old-world craftsmanship and savage commercial buffoonery which imagines Orlok as having been played by a geniune vampire. As for Francis Ford Coppola’s rights-having 1992 adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula… well, its chief point of interest is still Gary Oldman’s hairstyle.
Prior to becoming a household name, Stephen King did time as a high school English teacher and a laborer in an industrial laundry. These days, he could insulate his lovely Victorian home with crisp hundreds if such were his whim. Yet it seems he hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to watch every penny, wishing there was enough fat in the budget for the purchase of one measly comic book based on an insanely famous author’s obscure short story…
Or is he researching what it feels like to be an undiscovered writer in the digital age, anxiously dangling free content on his website in an attempt to build readership?
Broken into thrice weekly installments to be delivered over a period of eight weeks, King’s story concerns one Andrew Newsome, the sixth richest man in the world, and Kat MacDonald, the exponentially less well-to-do RN caring for him in the wake of a debilitating accident, another subject to which King is no stranger. As of this writing, the comic is only available on the author’s website, though the King juggernaut is so unstoppable, the next move may well be a film, a tv miniseries or a Broadway musical. Maine winters are long and cold. Perhaps even the master of suspense warms to the prospect of some extra insulation.
In the opening minutes of his new memoir Waging Heavy Peace (I listened to the audio book, and you can too for free), Neil Young talks about his model trains, his extensive collection of vintage cars, and not much about music per se — although he does highlight his entrepreneurial effort to save the music industry with a new-fangled audio system called PureTone.
For quite some time now, Young has lamented the decline of music during the digital age. It’s not pirating that’s the culprit. It’s the MP3, a format that degrades the quality of the music we hear. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference earlier this year (watch here), Young complained that the MP3 can’t “transfer the depth of the art.” “My goal,” he continued, “is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years.”
Enter PureTone, which has actually been renamed Pono more recently. The device/music service will hit the market next year, and it essentially promises to let fans hear recordings in super high fidelity, as if they owned the original master tapes created by various artists. Not long ago, Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, raved about the sound of Pono, telling Rolling Stone: “It’s not like some vague thing that you need dogs’ ears to hear. It’s a drastic difference.”
If that’s right, Young may do a great service for musicians everywhere, and make a lot of money for himself and others along the way. I mean imagine the number of remasters that could hit the market in the comings years, starting with two by Bob Dylan — The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited. A perfect place to begin.
We at Open Culture have discovered a handy piece of software that will make it easier to use our collection, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. Calibre is a free e‑book library management software that lets users convert e‑books from one format to another.
Say that you’ve downloaded Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the open ePUB format and want to move the book onto your Kindle. Calibre can convert the text into all of the major e‑reader formats, including Kindle’s proprietary format. The program will then sync the text to your device and you’re good to go.
Calibre supports e‑book formats used by major manufacturers (including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Sony), but if your device isn’t listed in the program’s list, Calibre’s “generic device” option will most likely do the job.
The program also offers a default viewer for reading texts on your computer, and books can be converted from one platform to another, making it easy to move books from your phone to iPad to laptop and beyond.
Calibre fills a niche for e‑book readers, providing a simple way to manage e‑libraries. The program also helps manage and organize online magazines, newspapers and other reading materials. Click “Fetch News” and Calibre will scan selected online news outlets and catalog them in your collection.
You can even buy books by using Calibre’s interface to search for the best price on a selected title.
“If you know little about Fellini,” warns Roger Ebert in his review of Fellini: I’m a Born Liar (watch it free online here), “this is not the place to start.” Perhaps he rightly issues such a disclaimer about a formally unorthodox documentary that plunges deeply and immediately into the aesthetics of its subject’s work while paying barely any heed to the facts of his life. But if you can’t say that Federico Fellinidealt near-exclusively in aesthetics, you can’t say it about anyone. The director’s love of artifice, which eventually led to his total dedication to shooting all scenes on a soundstage, produced motion pictures so flamboyant yet so distinctive and personal that first-time viewers still find themselves undecided as to whether to call them elegant or grotesque. The verdict, as any regular attendee of revival screenings of 8½, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and Amarcord knows, is that they’re both: grotesque to the extent of their elegance, and elegant to the extent of their grotesqueness. This already gives documentarian Damian Pettigrew much to work with, and indeed, he would have had the material and expertise to assemble a robust essay film on Fellini’s visuals alone. But he chose to make a fresher examination.
Though he premiered the movie in 2002, Pettigrew’s real work on I’m a Born Liar began nearly twenty years before. In 1983, he met with the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, intending to shoot a documentary about him. But upon realizing that their conversations came around inevitably to Fellini, the writer arranged a surprise meeting of the two filmmakers. Years later, Fellini would submit to the ten-hour interview from Pettigrew that structures this film. Certain collaborators give testimony, notably still-shaken actors like Donald Sutherland and Terence Stamp. But Calvino’s own appearance turns out to shed the most light on his countryman’s work, and vice versa, not least because both of them preferred to find the truth through elaborate fabrication. I’m a Born Liar’s surprisingly thorough Wikipedia page quotes a passage from Calvino’s Mr. Palomar that supposedly inspired Fellini on a shoot, but may also reflect the whole basis of his craft: “Life on the surface is so rich and various that I have no urge to enquire further. I believe that it is only when you’ve come to know the surface of things that you can try to find out what lies beneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.”
When I first heard that 43-year old Austrian daredevil and former military parachutist Felix Baumgartner would be jumping 128,000 feet from space, my immediate reaction was, “What? Why?!” Because why would anyone do that? And I assumed it was all some macho stunt to promote Red Bull, his corporate sponsor, which isn’t entirely unfounded. But I also had no sense of the historic context, the scientific implications, and until I read the details, the truly death-defying magnitude of it all. As I watched the jump and then learned more, my wonder and admiration grew, particularly in reading Baumgartner’s own accounts of his seven years of preparation for the feat.
Baumgartner bested Chuck Yeager on the same day in history that Yeager broke the sound barrier (he says Yeager’s going to be “pissed”). He also broke the record set by Joseph Kittinger, an Air Force pilot who leapt from 102,800 feet (19.5 miles) above earth in 1960. You can watch a short documentary of Kittinger’s famous jump above. The technology of 1960 didn’t allow for the crystal-clear images Baumgartner captured with his two suit cameras, but it’s still an impressive little film, made more so by Kittinger’s voice over describing the sensations he experienced during free fall. Below is a classic 1960 newsreel film of the jump, with a dramatic announcer and triumphal, martial music.
Kittinger and Baumgartner first met in 2008, and the elder test pilot supported and helped plan the Red Bull Stratos project that would break his record. He also served as Baumgartner’s mission control, guiding him from his tiny space capsule to the ground. The jump was apparently supposed to take place two years earlier, on the 50th anniversary of Kittinger’s, but was delayed. Below, you can watch Kittinger discuss the project and his own career in a 2010 interview with Red Bull.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
It happened suddenly one day. Howard Engel, a Canadian mystery writer, woke up and realized he couldn’t read the daily newspaper, let alone his own novels. He had suffered a stroke, it turns out, that left him with a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia, a condition that strangely leaves victims unable to read, but able to write. It seems paradoxical. Reading and writing go hand in hand, right? Not necessarily, and that’s why we’re glad that we have NPR’s artful video here to explain.
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