You may recognize Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser, aka 2CELLOS, from their rocking arrangement of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal earlier this year. This time, the classically-trained musicians have done themselves one better, with a frenetic, hard-hitting take on GNR’s “Welcome To The Jungle” that would give Slash himself a run for his hardcore cred.
2CELLOS are currently touring with Elton John, and you can pre-order their debut CD, which includes covers of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and U2’s “With or Without You.”
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Time to roll out a new media collection — a big collection of Cultural Icons. Here you will find great writers, dazzling filmmakers and musicians, brilliant philosophers and scientists — figures who have changed our cultural landscape throughout the years. You’ll see them in video, or hear their voices in audio.
The list currently features 230 icons, all speaking in their own words. The collection will inevitably grow as we add more material, or as you send suggestions our way. For now, how about we whet your appetite with 10 favorites? Then you can rummage through the full collection of Cultural Icons here.
(Note: Down the road, you can access this collection by clicking “Cultural Icons” in the top navigation bar.)
Salvador Dali - Video – Surrealist artist appears on “What’s My Line?” (1952)
Johnny Depp - Video – The versatile actor reads a letter from Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Anne Frank - Video – It is the only known footage of Anne Frank, author of the world’s most famous diary, and it’s now online.
Patti Smith — Video — The “godmother of punk” recalls her friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
Quentin Tarantino - Video – Pulp Fiction director lists his favorites films since 1992.
Leo Tolstoy – Video – Great footage of the last days of the towering Russian novelist. 1910.
Mark Twain – Video – America’s fabled writer captured on film by Thomas Edison in 1909.
Andy Warhol - Video – In 1979, Warhol created public access television programs. In this episode, he chats with Bianca Jagger & Steven Spielberg.
Tom Waits - Video – The raspy singer reads “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski.
Virginia Woolf — Audio — Recording comes from a 1937 BBC radio broadcast. The talk, entitled “Craftsmanship,” was part of a series called “Words Fail Me.” The only known recording of her voice.
A witty rendition of Queen’s classic played by the Finnish award winning street band Porkka Playboys. More of their work appears on the band’s YouTube channel. Enjoy…
FYI: It looks like “Inside Job,” the Oscar-Winning Documentary on the 2008 financial meltdown, is back online, thanks to the Internet Archive.
We’re a bit embarrassed to admit that it took us three times to spot the change in this fascinating video illusion at New Scientist, even after reading about the research behind the video. The test was developed by Kevin O’Regan and his team at the University of Paris Descartes as part of their work on perception. O’Regan is best known for his work on change blindness, our relative inability to perceive gradual change, and our tendency to focus solely on what we perceive to be the most dynamic or interesting element of a scene.
If this video isn’t enough to convince of you of O’Regan’s theories, he’s posted a whole slew of demonstrations at his website. Better yet, you can dispel any remaining doubts (or self-esteem) by taking this awareness test, which is even more dramatic. It bowled us over. Let us know in the comments if it did the same for you.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
In 1937, Walt Disney Studios shot Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a new-fangled camera, the multiplane camera, which allowed cartoon animation to take a quantum leap forward. Thanks to this new “super cartoon camera,” animated scenes suddenly looked more realistic and three-dimensional. You only need to watch this presentation by Walt Disney himself (recorded in 1957) and you’ll see what I mean. Disney shot many of its classic feature films – Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Peter Pan – with the multiplane camera, and it remained in production right through The Little Mermaid, filmed in 1989. Today, only three original Disney multiplane cameras survive.
A big thanks to Sergey for sending this vintage clip our way. If you see a good piece of open culture, don’t hesitate to send it our way…
Google celebrated Les Pauls’ 96th birthday today with a playable electric guitar doodle. And, naturally, some tried to make it sing. Above, we have a version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, while others strummed out versions of The Beatles’ Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, and Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi. By popular demand, the doodle will stay live on Google’s homepage for an extra day.
We told you this was coming, and now it’s here. The British Library has started to release 60,000+ texts from the 19th century in digital format. And they’re getting rolled out with the release of a new iPad app. (If you have any problems downloading the app, try doing it directly from the app store on your iPad.)
The upside: The new app currently features 1,000 works, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and other British classics. The collection gives you scans of the original editions. So you can read the works as they originally appeared.
The downside: The app won’t be free for long. Eventually, you’ll have to pay. So get in while you can, or just skim through our collection of Free eBooks and Audio Books. All classics, all the time…
Samuel Beckett’s haunting short story “The Lost Ones,” which tells of a group of people doomed to wander forever inside a narrow cylindrical prison, makes Waiting for Godot seem like Little Miss Sunshine. It is also nearly unadaptable since a story driven by the certainty of damnation leaves little room for dramatic tension … until now, perhaps.
This month’s New Scientist has a nice piece up about Unmakeablelove, a 3‑D interactive simulation based on “The Lost Ones” in which virtual bodies (created with motion capture, the same technique James Cameron used in Avatar) beat themselves, collide into each other, and slouch eternally towards nowhere, all driven by a force even more implacable than fate: the computer algorithms with which the piece was programmed.
And as with any good work of Existentialist Despair That Dooms All of Humanity to A Future Without Meaning or Hope, this one implicates the audience — spectators can only see inside the exhibit if they station themselves by one of six torches surrounding the 30-foot space. And when they do so, infrared video cameras project their own likenesses into the cylinder. There are no spectators.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
One of the most unique concerts from the British blues revival of the 1960s was the “Blues and Gospel Train,” filmed May 7, 1964 by Granada TV for the BBC. Fans who were lucky enough to get tickets–some 200 of them–were instructed to gather at Manchester’s Central Station by 7:30 that evening for a short train ride to the abandoned Wilbraham Road Station. When the train pulled in at Wilbraham Road, the audience poured out and found seats on one platform. The opposite side, decorated to look like an old railway station in the American South, served as a stage for Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Cousin Joe and Reverend Gary Davis. The performances are available on DVD as part of American Folk-Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963–1966. In the scene above, Muddy Waters sings, “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.”
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This week, U2’s 360° Tour hit the west coast of the US, stopping first in Seattle, then Oakland and next Anaheim. Though critics have offered mixed reviews (this v. that), we had ourselves a ball, horrendous traffic jams aside. And we were particularly touched by one moment with a poignant backstory.
During the show, the audience gets beamed up to Mark Kelly, an astronaut on the space shuttle Endeavour, who happens to be married to Gabby Giffords, the US representative shot this past January in Arizona. To the 70,000 onlookers, Kelly says “Tell my wife I love her very much she knows” – the same lines delivered by Major Tom, the fictional astronaut, made famous by David Bowie’s Space Oddity: And, with that, U2 breaks into “Beautiful Day,” the song that served as a wake-up call for the Endeavour crew, at Gabby Giffords’ personal request. How’s that for a nice touch?
P.S. Yes we know that Endeavour returned to earth last week. But we have nothing against the willing suspension of disbelief.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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