Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Performance at the Newport Folk Festival

‌

A Com­plete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties and sub­se­quent elec­tri­fied break with it, has been praised for not tak­ing exces­sive lib­er­ties, at least by the stan­dards of pop­u­lar music biopics. Its con­ver­sion of a real chap­ter of cul­tur­al his­to­ry has entailed var­i­ous con­fla­tions, com­pres­sions,…

The World in a Cloverleaf: A World Map from 1581

‌

In 1581, the medieval car­tog­ra­ph­er and Protes­tant the­olo­gian Hein­rich Bünt­ing cre­at­ed a sym­bol­ic map of the world that adorned his book Itin­er­ar­i­um Sacrae Scrip­turae (Trav­el Through Holy Scrip­ture). Hand-col­ored and shaped like a three-leaf clover, the map put Jerusalem at its cen­ter, high­light­ing its cen­tral role in Chris­tian­i­ty, Judaism, and Islam. From…

Why the Tavern Scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds Is a Master Class in Filmmaking

‌

Ide­al­ly, a view­er should be able to iden­ti­fy the work of a par­tic­u­lar auteur from any one scene that the auteur has direct­ed. In real­i­ty, it’s not always pos­si­ble to do so, even in the work of film­mak­ers with high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic styles. But in the case of Quentin Taran­ti­no, it would prob­a­bly be more dif­fi­cult…

Radio Caroline, the Pirate Radio Ship That Rocked the British Music World (1965)

‌

Nowa­days musi­cians can reach hun­dreds, thou­sands, some­times mil­lions of lis­ten­ers with a few, usu­al­ly free, online ser­vices and a min­i­mal grasp of tech­nol­o­gy. That’s not to say there aren’t still eco­nom­ic bar­ri­ers aplen­ty for the strug­gling artist, but true inde­pen­dence is not an impos­si­ble prospect.

In the 1950s and 60s, on the oth­er hand,…

The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

‌

The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone fash­ion, using a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The final lines of this strong rec­om­men­da­tion…