The Little Drummer Boy. Animated. Off of Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album. Have a joyful and safe holiday…
My Blackberry Is Not Working!
Classic… This fruity sketch just aired on the BBC program The One Ronnie. Great work by Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield.
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Sir David Frost Interviews Julian Assange Upon Release from Jail
Let me preface things by saying this will likely be our last WikiLeaks post for a while. Don’t want to slip into WikiLeaks overkill. With that said…
Yesterday, Sir David Frost landed the first television interview with Julian Assange since his release from a London jail. The 24 minute interview aired on Al Jazeera English (where Frost hosts a show called Frost Over the World) and pretty quickly they dive into some important questions: Do governments have the right to keep state secrets? And do media organizations have the right to divulge such secrets? Assuming so, where (if anywhere) must journalists draw the line? Why has WikiLeaks recently taken aim at the United States? Is it fair to characterize WikiLeaks as an anarchic organization? The list of questions goes on, including ones delving into Assange’s legal problems. Thanks for @eacion for the heads up on this one…
Shaq Conducts The Boston Pops: A Little Christmas Delight
This Monday, the great Shaquille O’Neal, now playing for the Boston Celtics, made his conducting debut, leading the Boston Pops Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus at the Holiday Pops Concert. You’ll immediately recognize the tunes: the Christmas standard, “Sleigh Ride,” leading into Queen’s power ballad “We Are the Champions.”
via Mother Jones
Neil Gaiman’s Dark Christmas Poem Animated
39 Degrees North, a Beijing motion graphics studio, started developing an unconventional Christmas card this year. And once they got going, there was no turning back. Above, we have the end result – an animated version of the uber dark Christmas poem (read text here) written by Neil Gaiman, the bestselling author of sci-fi and fantasy short stories. The poem was published in Gaiman’s collection Smoke and Mirrors.
Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse in Time Lapse Video
When was the last time the lunar eclipse and winter solstice coincided? The U.S. Naval Observatory says 1638; Starhawk, a prominent Wiccan, puts it at 1544. Needless to say, these coinciding events are a rarity. So, in case you missed it, we have a nice time lapse video shot by William Castleman in Gainesville, Florida. Castelman also produced this fine gem: The Milky Way Over Texas.
via @6oz
F. Scott Fitzgerald Recites “Ode to a Nightingale”
70 years ago today, F. Scott Fitzgerald died an untimely death, his life cut short by alcoholism, tuberculosis, and eventually a series of heart attacks. He was only 44 years old. Today, we remember Fitzgerald with some vintage audio – the author of The Great Gatsby reciting John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” from memory. Fitzgerald deviates several times from the text before going completely off the rails. And then the poem, a meditation on mortality and the transience of beauty, cuts off abruptly halfway through. A rather fitting metaphor for Fitzgerald’s own life.
According to Park Bucker, an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, the recording was likely made around 1940, during Fitzgerald’s last year, perhaps in a self-recording phonograph booth in Southern California. When Fitzgerald died, he was living in Los Angeles, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter, hoping to write one last great novel. In her Paris Review interview, Dorothy Parker described Fitzgerald’s bleak last days: “It was terrible about Scott; if you’d seen him you’d have been sick. When he died no one went to the funeral, not a single soul came, or even sent a flower. I said, ‘Poor son of a bitch,’ a quote right out of The Great Gatsby, and everyone thought it was another wisecrack. But it was said in dead seriousness.”
You can find several texts by Fitzgerald in our collection of Free Audio Books.
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The Vimeo Video School
You all know and love Vimeo videos. (We’ve featured many here before.) Now Vimeo will teach you how to make your own videos. The new Vimeo Video School includes some nuts-and-bolts lessons (i.e., how to capture good sound or improve your framing & composition). And then there are some extra tutorials created by members of the Vimeo community. Above, we give you a short introduction to storyboarding (part of a larger series on the subject), which happens to feature original drawings from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. And yes, by the way, American viewers can watch Taxi Driver online (for free) right here.
Note: The maker of Flip video cameras has also produced a series of instructional videos. You can find them on YouTube right here. Thanks to @TechSoup for the fyi…
Richard Dawkins Plays the Piano: “Earth History in C Major”
Oxford’s renowned biologist Richard Dawkins puts the history of life on earth in perspective, using simply a piano. This short video is a great jumping off point for this brilliant lecture Dawkins gave back in 1991. It’s called “Waking Up in the Universe, Growing Up in the Universe,” and the 57-minute video pulls you deeper into some big questions. What’s the origin of life? Where do we fall in the scheme of life on planet Earth? What’s our role in the larger universe? And how lucky are we to have the brains and tools to understand the awesome wonders that surround us? Thanks to “Constantline” for sending today’s video along.
Watch “Ryan,” Winner of an Oscar and 60 Other Awards
Chris Landreth turned to animation as a second career and eventually landed an Oscar with Ryan (2004), a short animated film based on the life of Ryan Larkin, an artist who produced influential animated films during the 1960s, before falling into a personal downward spiral. You can revisit two of Larkin’s animated films (both referenced in the film above) on NFB.CA. Start with the Oscar-nominated short, Walking, from 1969, and then turn to Street Musique (1972). And don’t forget to download NFB’s free iPad app where you can watch Ryan in a portable yet visually compelling format.
The Landreth/Larkin films mentioned above have been added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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WikiRebels: New Documentary Tells the WikiLeaks Story
Earlier this week, Sweden’s public television service, SVT (akin to PBS and the BBC), released a one hour documentary chronicling the history of WikiLeaks, starting with its early leaks of Scientology documents and ending with its recent release of American diplomatic cables. Since July, SVT reporters have followed WikiLeaks, traveling near and far to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and other top members of the whistleblowing organization, some of who have since left the embattled internet site. All in all, a decent introduction to Wikileaks and its controversial mission. Thanks to @eacion for the heads up…
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!
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