Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russian Studio Mosfilm: Classic Films, Beloved Comedies, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa & More

in Film | March 20th, 2017

To most inter­na­tion­al cinephiles, the word Mos­film imme­di­ate­ly brings to mind two tow­er­ing names in Russ­ian motion pic­tures: Sergei Eisen­stein and Andrei Tarkovsky. Both direc­tors made not just impor­tant movies but took major steps to devel­op the visu­al lan­guage of film itself, and both worked for Mos­film, one of Rus­si­a’s largest and old­est film stu­dios. First estab­lished in 1923, it went on to pro­duce more than 3,000 films dur­ing the Sovi­et era, some of which now define the cin­e­ma of that peri­od. Now view­ers around the world can enjoy their aes­thet­ic lush­ness, his­tor­i­cal inter­est, and pure enter­tain­ment val­ue more eas­i­ly than ever on Mos­film’s Youtube chan­nel, which offers among its many freely view­able pic­tures a selec­tion of 70 films in high def­i­n­i­tion.

You’ll want to start, of course, with Eisen­stein and Tarkovsky. Mos­film has made avail­able in HD the for­mer’s Alexan­der Nevsky (1938) and much of the lat­ter’s fil­mog­ra­phy: Ivan’s Child­hood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mir­ror (1975), and Stalk­er (1979).

For all their high artis­tic achieve­ment, how­ev­er, they may admit­ted­ly rein­force the West­’s Cold War-era image of Rus­sians as ter­ri­bly seri­ous peo­ple who sel­dom even crack a smile, let alone laugh. So why not fol­low those up with a dive into Mos­film’s con­sid­er­able HD selec­tion of beloved, light-heart­ed Sovi­et come­dies?

Of all Sovi­et com­e­dy direc­tors, Leonid Gaidai stands as by far the most suc­cess­ful. You can watch a fair few of his works, long and short, on Mos­film’s HD playlist, includ­ing Oper­a­tion Y and Shurik’s Oth­er Adven­tures (1965); the intrigu­ing­ly titled Kid­nap­ping, Cau­casian Style (1967); The Dia­mond Arm (1969), the most pop­u­lar soci­ety com­e­dy ever; The Twelve Chairs (1971); Ivan Vasilievich Changes Pro­fes­sion (1973), based on a play by Mikhail Bul­gakov; and It Can’t Be! (1975). It also offers sev­er­al films from Gaidai’s con­tem­po­rary Eldar Ryazanov, who worked in a more satir­i­cal vein (and showed a sur­pris­ing will­ing­ness to poke fun at the absur­di­ties of Sovi­et life): Car­ni­val Night (1956), the beloved musi­cal Hus­sar Bal­lad (1962), Beware of the Car (1966), Office Romance (1977), Sta­tion for Two (1982), and A Cru­el Romance (1984).

You may also notice the con­spic­u­ous pres­ence of a cer­tain high­ly notable non-Russ­ian film­mak­er: Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, who in 1975 worked with Mos­film to make Der­su Uza­la, an adap­ta­tion of the mem­oirs of a trap­per in Rus­si­a’s far east­ern wilder­ness. It came as just one of Mos­film’s many lit­er­ary adap­ta­tions, the most famous per­haps being Sergei Bon­darchuk’s 1969 vision of Leo Tol­stoy’s War and Peace. On Mos­film’s HD playlist you’ll also find two fea­tures draw­ing on the work of Anton Chekhov: Andrei Kon­chalovsky’s Uncle Vanya (1971), and Emil Loteanu’s My Ten­der and Affec­tion­ate Beast, or a Hunt­ing Acci­dent (1978), a fea­ture-length adap­ta­tion of A Hunt­ing Par­ty.

Mos­film’s Youtube chan­nel fea­tures not just Sovi­et-era movies, but those from more recent years as well: the mighty film stu­dio sur­vived the dis­so­lu­tion of the Sovi­et Union itself, con­tin­u­ing to con­tribute to cin­e­ma as a qua­si-pri­vate fed­er­a­tion of inde­pen­dent stu­dios. Its cur­rent Direc­tor Gen­er­al, Karen Shakhnazarov, boasts an impres­sive fil­mog­ra­phy of his own. You can get an HD taste of his work by watch­ing Jazzmen (1983), Win­ter Evening in Gagra (1985), Couri­er (1986),  Zero­grad (1989), The Assas­sin of the Tsar (1991), Dreams (1993), Poi­sons, or the World His­to­ry of Poi­son­ing (2001), and The Van­ished Empire (2008), all of which weave togeth­er the threads — the vision­ary, the his­tor­i­cal, the every­day, the absurd â€” run­ning through Mos­film’s long his­to­ry.

NOTE: Though many of the titles on Mos­film’s HD playlist appear only in Russ­ian, most of the films them­selves come with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. Make sure to click the “CC” icon on the low­er right of the Youtube play­er to turn them on.

Some of the films men­tioned above will be added to our meta col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch War and Peace: The Splen­did, Epic Film Adap­ta­tion of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Nov­el (1969)

Free Films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisen­stein & Oth­er Russ­ian Greats

When Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Watched Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: I Was “Very Hap­py to Find Myself Liv­ing on Earth”

Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Free Sergei Eisen­stein Films

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

in Animation, Software, Video Games | March 20th, 2017

For a young per­son in an ani­ma­tion-based field, the oppor­tu­ni­ty to share new work with direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki must feel like a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty.

This may still hold true for Nobuo Kawaka­mi, the chair­man of Dwan­go, a Japan­ese telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and media com­pa­ny, but not for the rea­sons he like­ly antic­i­pat­ed at the start of the above video.

The sub­ject of their dis­cus­sion is a com­put­er gen­er­at­ed ani­mat­ed mod­el whose arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence caus­es it to move by squirm­ing on its head. Its cre­ators haven’t invest­ed it with any par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty traits or sto­ry­line, but its flayed appear­ance and tor­tu­ous move­ments sug­gest it’s unlike­ly to be board­ing Miyazaki’s mag­i­cal cat bus any time soon.

Even with­out an explic­it nar­ra­tive, the model’s poten­tial should be evi­dent to any­one who’s ever sat through the final-reel res­ur­rec­tion of a hor­ri­bly maimed, pre­sumed-dead ter­ror­iz­er of scant­i­ly clad young ladies.

The model’s grotesque squirm­ings could also be an asset to zom­bie video games, as Kawaka­mi excit­ed­ly points out.

Let us remem­ber that Miyazaki’s films are root­ed not in gross-out effects, but redemp­tion, a rev­er­ence for nature, and respect for chil­dren and all liv­ing things.

The mas­ter watch­es the demon­stra­tion with­out com­ment, then dis­pens­es with tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese eti­quette in favor of some strong­ly word­ed med­i­cine that leaves no doubt as to what he real­ly thought of Dwan­go’s arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent wretch:

“I am utter­ly dis­gust­ed… I strong­ly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”  

(At this point, you real­ly should watch the video, to hear Miyaza­k­i’s open­ing state­ment, about a dis­abled friend for whom even a sim­ple high-five is a painful phys­i­cal exer­tion.)

Poor Kawaka­mi-san! Uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly shamed in front of his col­leagues by a nation­al trea­sure, he doesn’t push back. All he can offer is some­thing along the lines of “We didn’t mean any­thing by it”—a state­ment that seems cred­i­ble.

The Amer­i­can pres­i­dent may be into dehu­man­iz­ing those with dis­abil­i­ties, but the Dwan­go crew’s heads were like­ly occu­pied with boy­ish visions of a thrilling­ly grue­some zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.

It’s a harsh, but impor­tant mes­sage for Miyaza­ki to have got­ten across. Dwan­go is respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing a lot of online games. In oth­er words, they hold con­sid­er­able sway over impres­sion­able youth.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder Toshio Suzu­ki grants Kawaka­mi and his col­leagues an oppor­tu­ni­ty to save face, ask­ing what the team’s goals are.

“We’d like to build a machine that can draw pic­tures like humans do,” one shell­shocked-look­ing young man responds.

What, like, Hen­ri Mail­larde­t’s automa­ton from 1810? While I can imag­ine such a con­trap­tion show­ing up in one of Miyazaki’s steam-punk-fla­vored adven­tures, the hush that greets this state­ment all but screams “wrong answer!”

What will this encounter lead to?

The release of an online game in which one scores points by hideous­ly dis­mem­ber­ing the ani­mat­ed form of direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki?

Or a new­found sen­si­tiv­i­ty, in which cool tech­no­log­i­cal advances are viewed through a lens of actu­al human expe­ri­ence?

Only time will tell.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Essence of Hayao Miyaza­ki Films: A Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Human­i­ty at the Heart of His Ani­ma­tion

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

Hayao Miyaza­ki Meets Aki­ra Kuro­sawa: Watch the Titans of Japan­ese Film in Con­ver­sa­tion (1993)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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An Animated Introduction to McCarthyism: What Is It? And How Did It Happen?

in History | March 20th, 2017

Dur­ing the 1970s, a young Don­ald Trump was men­tored by Roy Cohn, a brash, take-no-pris­on­ers lawyer, who first came to promi­nence dur­ing the 1950s, when he served as the con­sigliere to Joseph McCarthy and his cam­paign to expose sus­pect­ed com­mu­nists in the Unit­ed States. In what’s known as the Sec­ond Red Scare, McCarthy led increas­ing­ly broad and para­noid inves­ti­ga­tions, try­ing to find Com­mu­nists, sym­pa­thiz­ers and spies, both inside and out­side the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Most­ly on the basis of rumor, not fact, “thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als were aggres­sive­ly inves­ti­gat­ed and ques­tioned before gov­ern­ment pan­els.” Black­lists were cre­at­ed. Some were jailed. Careers and liveli­hoods were destroyed.

Year lat­er, play­wright Arthur Miller recalled, â€śSuf­fice it to say, it was a time of great–no doubt unprecedented–fear.” “The air of ter­ror was heavy.” “I was sure the whole thing would soon go away.” Even­tu­al­ly a sense of futil­i­ty gave way to anger, and Miller respond­ed by writ­ing The Cru­cible, a com­men­tary on McCarthy­ism wrapped in a dra­ma about the Salem witch tri­als of 1692/93.

Above, you can watch above a six minute primer on McCarthy­ism, pre­pared by Ellen Schreck­er, pro­fes­sor emeri­ta of Amer­i­can his­to­ry at Yeshi­va Uni­ver­si­ty. An expert on the his­to­ry of McCarthy­ism, she has been called “the dean of the anti-anti-Com­mu­nist his­to­ri­ans.” Her books on the sub­ject include: Many Are the Crimes: McCarthy­ism in Amer­i­ca and Age of McCarthy­ism: A Brief His­to­ry with Doc­u­ments.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Bertolt Brecht Tes­ti­fies Before the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee (1947)

Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Iden­ti­fy It’s A Won­der­ful Life as Com­mu­nist Pro­pa­gan­da

Watch “Don’t Be a Suck­er!,” the 1947 US Gov­ern­ment Anti-Hatred Film That’s Rel­e­vant Again in 2017

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

 

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Chuck Berry (RIP) Reviews Punk Songs by The Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Clash, Talking Heads & More (1980)

in Music | March 18th, 2017

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When the punk wave broke in the UK and the States in the mid-1970s, it threat­ened to leave behind the estab­lished rock bands that once seemed so rebel­lious. Pete Town­shend, the gui­tar-smash­ing song­writer of The Who, said: “I kind of wel­comed [the arrival of punk], chal­lenged it, and want­ed it to hap­pen, and then I real­ized that the per­son they want­ed to shoot was me.” And indeed Sid Vicious, of the Sex Pis­tols, would say, “I don’t have any heroes. They’re all use­less to me.”

And yet despite the pos­tur­ing, punk remained root­ed in the rock tra­di­tion, pay­ing trib­ute, whether they knew it or not, to their musi­cal fathers (The Bea­t­les, The Who, The Stones) and even the grand­fa­thers (Chuck Berry and Bud­dy Hol­ly). In Please Kill Me: The Uncen­sored Oral His­to­ry of Punk (a book I com­plete­ly rec­om­mend) edi­tor Legs McNeil writes:

Then the Ramones came back, and count­ed off again, and played their best eigh­teen min­utes of rock n roll that I had ever heard. You could hear the Chuck Berry in it, which was all I lis­tened to, that and the Bea­t­les sec­ond album with all the Chuck Berry cov­ers on it.

It all goes back to Chuck Berry, and Berry knew it. In a 1980 inter­view with the zin Jet Lag, Berry shared his thoughts on the punk anthems of the day and spot­ted his influ­ence in many of them.

The Sex Pis­tols’ “God Save the Queen”:

“What’s this guy so angry about any­way? Gui­tar work and pro­gres­sion is like mine. Good back­beat. Can’t under­stand most of the vocals. If you’re going to be mad at least let the peo­ple know what you’re mad about.”

The Clash’s “Com­plete Con­trol”:

“Sounds like the first one. The rhythm and chord­ing work well togeth­er. Did this guy have a sore throat when he sang the vocals?”

The Ramones’ “Sheena is a Punk Rock­er”:

“A good lit­tle jump num­ber. These guys remind me of myself when I first start­ed, I only knew three chords too.”

The Roman­tics’ “What I Like About You”: 

“Final­ly some­thing you can dance to. Sounds a lot like the six­ties with some of my riffs thrown in for good mea­sure. You say this is new? I’ve heard this stuff plen­ty of times. I can’t under­stand the big fuss.”

Talk­ing Heads’ “Psy­cho Killer”: 

“A funky lit­tle num­ber, that’s for sure. I like the bass a lot. Good mix­ture and a real good flow. The singer sounds like he has a bad case of stage fright.”

Wire’s “I Am the Fly” and Joy Divi­sion’s Unknown Plea­sures:

“So this is the so-called new stuff. It’s noth­ing I ain’t heard before. It sounds like an old blues jam that BB and Mud­dy would car­ry on back­stage at the old amphithe­atre in Chica­go. The instru­ments may be dif­fer­ent but the exper­i­men­t’s the same.”

Chuck Berry passed away today, still unsur­passed, at age 90. Long live Chuck.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds and h/t @alyssamilano and @austinkleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen and the E Street Band Impro­vis­es and Plays, Com­plete­ly Unre­hearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Nev­er Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

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Hear Prince’s Personal Playlist of Party Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Party to Life

in Music | March 17th, 2017


Many years ago, I took a job as a wed­ding DJ for a few months to knit ends togeth­er in col­lege. What­ev­er you pic­ture about the job of a wed­ding DJ, I can assure you that it’s even less glam­orous than that. But among the late hours, low pay, and end­less schlep­ping lay at least one pearl-like perk—at every func­tion, when the mood began to ebb along with my san­i­ty, I would put on Prince’s “Con­tro­ver­sy,” turn up the speak­ers as loud as I could, and for the next sev­en min­utes, all would be well. (See him play the song in 2010, above, to an audi­ence in Antwerp.)

For the rest of the night and the rest of the week, I’d be lost in mid-nod to that per­fect dis­til­la­tion of funk, the great­est dis­til­la­tion of funk to include the Lord’s Prayer that was ever put to tape.

Prince wrote per­fect par­ty songs—dozens of them, includ­ing the defin­i­tive par­ty song, “1999,” which Mar­tin Schnei­der at Dan­ger­ous Minds calls “a supreme sig­ni­fi­er for a Six­teen Can­dles lev­el blowout cel­e­bra­tion”… for a cer­tain cohort at least.

An entire mix­tape of Prince tunes would do right by any par­ty, but what would the man him­self put on? Sure­ly he didn’t just play his own music, although… why not? We do know he kept it raw and funky for Pais­ley Park gath­er­ings. In a playlist he pro­vid­ed to the TV show The New Girl in 2013 for an episode fea­tur­ing a fic­tion­al Prince par­ty, he opens with the midtem­po stomp of The Sta­ples Singers’ 1974 Stax Record­ing “City in the Sky.” Before long we’re onto the stone cold groove of Ste­vie Wonder’s “High­er Ground” and the dirty funk of Ohio Player’s “Skin Tight” a song about a “bad, bad mis­sus” in “skin tight britch­es.”

The Prince par­ty playlist (avail­able on Spo­ti­fy, YouTube, or stream it all below) has just the right mix of erot­ic, roman­tic, and spiritual—with the psy­che­del­ic funk of Shug­gie Otis thrown in, naturally—some of the most fine­ly-tuned soul the sev­en­ties pro­duced. One of the lat­est record­ings on the playlist, Cha­ka Khan’s “I Was Made to Love Him” came out in 1978, the same year as Prince’s first album, so we can take a fair­ly good guess at what he was lis­ten­ing to when he made his debut. In fact, we might look at the playlist as a snap­shot of the funk-rock-soul genius from Min­neapo­lis’ orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tions, which still res­onate like cos­mic radi­a­tion in his late dig­i­tal-era record­ings.

With the Prince vault opened and hun­dreds of nev­er-before-heard songs set for release, we’ll have years of oppor­tu­ni­ty to play spot-the-influ­ence. In the mean­time, get some peo­ple over and put on the mix above. If you sense a lull, drop “Con­tro­ver­sy” and watch the most awk­ward guests come alive with moves they nev­er knew they had.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Prince (RIP) Per­forms Ear­ly Hits in a 1982 Con­cert: “Con­tro­ver­sy,” “I Wan­na Be Your Lover” & More

The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Com­ic Book: A New Release

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Marshall McLuhan in Two Minutes: A Brief Animated Introduction to the 1960s Media Theorist Who Predicted Our Present

in Technology | March 17th, 2017

Mar­shall McLuhan, writes nov­el­ist and artist Dou­glas Cou­p­land, entered the zeit­geist in the 1960s as “a guru or as a vil­lain – as a har­bin­ger of the flow­er­ing of cul­ture, or of its death,” a “fud­dy-dud­dy fiftysome­thing Eng­lish lit pro­fes­sor from Toron­to” whose dis­tinc­tive research inter­ests and even more dis­tinc­tive habits of mind empow­ered him to come up with still-res­o­nant insights into the mod­ern media land­scape. He knew “that the point of much of tech­nol­o­gy, TV, for instance, was­n’t the con­tent of the shows you were watch­ing on it. Rather, what mat­tered was mere­ly the fact that you were watch­ing TV. The act of ana­lyz­ing the con­tent of TV – or of oth­er medi­ums – is either sen­ti­men­tal or it’s beside the point.” The medi­um, in oth­er words, is the mes­sage.

That best-known of McLuhan’s prophet­ic one-lin­ers (on which he expands in the ABC Radio Nation­al talk below) remains as true now as it was when it first appeared in his book Under­stand­ing Media: The Exten­sions of Man in 1964.

Cou­p­land empha­sizes that dif­fer­ent kinds of media, then as now, “force you to favor cer­tain parts of your brain over oth­ers,” which we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry know from inten­sive dai­ly expe­ri­ence: “that hour you spent on Face­book came at the expense of some oth­er way of using your brain, most like­ly TV view­ing or book-read­ing, though as books and TV recede, ever more web-medi­at­ed activ­i­ties will replace each oth­er to the point where we’ll have long for­got­ten what the pre-elec­tron­ic mind was to begin with.”

Cou­p­land once wrote a kind of biog­ra­phy of McLuhan that dis­tilled the thinker’s life, work, and cur­rent rel­e­vance into less than 250 pages, but the video at the top of the post, com­mis­sioned by Al Jazeera from ani­ma­tor Daniel Sav­age and nar­rat­ed by Hong Kong activist Alex Chow, does it in just over two min­utes. Chow reminds us that, even today, “if you don’t under­stand the medi­um, you don’t ful­ly under­stand the mes­sage,” look­ing back to the inven­tion of the print­ing press, and thus of mass media, and how its forms “changed our col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence. It informed our col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty, how we imag­ined our­selves.” In what McLuhan called the â€śelec­tric envi­ron­ment,” where “every­thing hap­pens at once. There’s no con­ti­nu­ity, there’s no con­nec­tion, there’s no fol­low-through. It’s just all now,” we will expe­ri­ence the end of secre­cy, and with it “the end of monop­o­lies of knowl­edge.”

55 years ago, McLuhan wrote that “the next medi­um, what­ev­er it is – it may be the exten­sion of con­scious­ness – will include tele­vi­sion as its con­tent, not as its envi­ron­ment. A com­put­er as a research and com­mu­ni­ca­tion instru­ment could enhance retrieval, obso­lesce mass library orga­ni­za­tion, retrieve the indi­vid­u­al’s ency­clo­pe­dic func­tion and flip it into a pri­vate line to speed­i­ly tai­lored data of a sal­able kind.” As we’ve since dis­cov­ered, these devel­op­ments have both their upsides and down­sides. But as Cou­p­land writes, con­sid­er that pas­sage seri­ous­ly and “see if it does­n’t give you a chill.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing (1976)

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Hear Mar­shall McLuhan’s The Medi­um is the Mas­sage (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Tears for Fears Sings “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” with Musician Who Created Divine Dulcimer Version of Their Song

in Music | March 17th, 2017

The web­site Twist­ed Sifter sets the stage for the delight­ful video above:

Last year, musi­cian Ted Yoder uploaded a ham­mered dul­cimer ren­di­tion of “Every­body Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears on YouTube. [Watch it below.]

Then last month, he did a Face­book live broad­cast of the song and both videos have since been viewed mil­lion of times. That’s when singer Curt Smith and drum­mer Jamie Wol­lam decid­ed to drop by Yoder’s orchard for an unfor­get­table encore.

It’s worth not­ing that Mr. Yoder is a Nation­al Ham­mered Dul­cimer cham­pi­on, and con­sid­ered by many  â€śthe Bela Fleck of the ham­mered dul­cimer.” Over on YouTube you can hear him play dul­cimer ver­sions of “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps,” â€śDon’t Stop Believ­ing,” Bach’s Pre­lude to Cel­lo Suite, “Scar­bor­ough Fair,” and more.

For any­one not famil­iar with the orig­i­nal 1985 ver­sion of “Every­body Wants to Rule the World,” have a lis­ten here.

via Twist­ed Sifter

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Every Front Page of The New York Times in Under a Minute: Watch the Evolution of “The Gray Lady” from 1852 to Present

in History, Media, Technology | March 17th, 2017

Buck­ling under infor­ma­tion over­load?

The long view can be sooth­ing, as film­mak­er Josh Beg­ley proves in just under a minute, above. The data artist reduced 165 years worth of chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered New York Times front pages—every sin­gle one since 1852—to a grid of inky rec­tan­gles flash­ing past at light­ning speed.

You won’t be able to make out the head­lines as the front page news whips past to the some­what omi­nous strains of com­pos­er Philip Glass’ ”Dead Things.”

Instead the impres­sion is of watch­ing something—or someone—steadily bear­ing wit­ness.

Obvi­ous­ly, any rep­utable new source does more than sim­ply note the unfold­ing of events. Its read­ers look to it as a source of analy­sis and cri­tique, in addi­tion to well-researched fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion.

The Gray Lady, as the Times has long been known, has recent­ly weath­ered an uptick in slings and arrows from both the left and the right, yet her longevi­ty is not eas­i­ly dis­missed.

Blog­ger Jason Kot­tke watched the video with an eye toward some of the paper’s most notable design changes. His find­ings also remind us of some of the his­toric events to appear on the Times’ front page—Lincoln’s assas­si­na­tion, Nixon’s res­ig­na­tion, and the elec­tion of our first Black pres­i­dent, which it described as a “nation­al catharsis—a repu­di­a­tion of a his­tor­i­cal­ly unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can pres­i­dent and his eco­nom­ic and for­eign poli­cies.”

How many of the over 50,000 front pages fea­tured above were deemed per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant enough to squir­rel away in a trunk or an attic?

Have dig­i­tal archives decreed that this prac­tice will soon gasp its last, along with the print media that inspired it?

What will we use to wrap our fish and line our bird cages?

Read the New York Times 2012 (non-front page) cov­er­age of Apple’s rejec­tion of Josh Begley’s Drone+ app here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Inac­cu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

The New York Times’ First Pro­file of Hitler: His Anti-Semi­tism Is Not as “Gen­uine or Vio­lent” as It Sounds (1922)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in New York City.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is play­ing at The Brick in Brook­lyn through tomor­row night. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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