Dizzy Gillespie Worries About Nuclear & Environmental Disaster in Vintage Animated Films

in Film | March 28th, 2014

Dizzy Gille­spie was one of the best jazz trum­pet play­ers of all time. His vir­tu­osic play­ing, along with his tricked out trum­pet and his freak­ish­ly elas­tic cheeks, turned him into a musi­cal icon of the 20th cen­tu­ry. But did you know that he lent his voice to an Oscar-win­ning movie?

The Hole (1962), which you can see above, is an exper­i­men­tal ani­mat­ed short about two con­struc­tion work­ers engaged in an increas­ing­ly intense con­ver­sa­tion about free will and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an acci­den­tal nuclear war. Gille­spie impro­vised the dia­logue oppo­site actor George Matthews, a giant of a man who was most famous for play­ing movie thugs. The style of the ani­ma­tion is loose, blotchy and rough – in oth­er words, about as un-Dis­ney as can be.

And that was by design. John Hub­ley, who direct­ed the movie along with his wife Faith Hub­ley, got his start in ani­ma­tion by work­ing on some of Disney’s most famous ear­ly films includ­ing Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarves, Bam­bi and Fan­ta­sia, but he found that his artis­tic ambi­tions lay beyond Uncle Walt’s vision. After the war, he helped found the Unit­ed Pro­duc­tions of Amer­i­ca and even cre­at­ed its most suc­cess­ful char­ac­ter – Mr. Magoo — only to be forced out of the com­pa­ny dur­ing the Red Scare.

After mar­ry­ing Faith in 1955, Hub­ley found­ed Sto­ry­board Stu­dios to make visu­al­ly adven­tur­ous, social­ly mind­ed ani­mat­ed movies. (Fun fact: John and Faith Hubley’s daugh­ter Geor­gia grew up to be the drum­mer for the indie band Yo La Ten­go.) The Hole (1962) proved to be very suc­cess­ful for the stu­dio; it won an Acad­e­my Award for Best Ani­mat­ed Short and in 2013, it was select­ed for the Unit­ed States Nation­al Film Reg­istry by the Library of Con­gress as being “cul­tur­al­ly, his­tor­i­cal­ly, or aes­thet­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant.”

Gille­spie and the Hub­leys con­tin­ued to col­lab­o­rate in two oth­er movies The Hat, which co starred Dud­ley Moore, and the supreme­ly groovy Voy­age to Next (1974). In that lat­ter film, above, Dizzy and Mau­reen Sta­ple­ton play Father Time and Moth­er Nature respec­tive­ly. They watch in won­der, con­cern and even­tu­al­ly alarm as human­i­ty evolves from com­mu­nal vil­lagers to greedy nation­al­ists on the brink self-anni­hi­la­tion.

You can find both films list­ed in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds and NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dizzy Gille­spie Runs for US Pres­i­dent, 1964. Promis­es to Make Miles Davis Head of the CIA

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Jazz Greats Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young & Ella Fitzger­ald (1950)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Hear Allen Ginsberg’s Short Free Course on Shakespeare’s Play, The Tempest (1980)

in Education, Poetry | March 28th, 2014

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Gins­berg Class One

Gins­berg Class Two

Like so many great poets, Allen Gins­berg com­posed extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly as he spoke, in eru­dite para­graphs, recit­ing lines and whole poems from memory—in his case, usu­al­ly the poems of William Blake. In a 1966 Paris Review inter­view, for exam­ple, he dis­cuss­es and quotes Blake at length, con­clud­ing “The thing I under­stood from Blake was that it was pos­si­ble to trans­mit a mes­sage through time that could reach the enlight­ened.” Eight years lat­er, Gins­berg would begin to mid­wife this con­cept as a teacher at the new­ly-found­ed Jack Ker­ouac School of Dis­em­bod­ied Poet­ics at the Naropa Insti­tute in Boul­der, Col­orado. Gins­berg taught sum­mer work­shops at the school from 1974 until the end of his life, even­tu­al­ly spend­ing the remain­der of the year in a full-time posi­tion at Brook­lyn Col­lege. The Inter­net Archive hosts record­ings of many of these work­shops, such as his lec­tures on 19th Cen­tu­ry Poet­ry, Jack Ker­ouac, Spir­i­tu­al Poet­ics, and Basic Poet­ics. In the audio lec­tures here, from August 1980, Gins­berg teach­es a four-part course on Shakespeare’s The Tem­pest (parts one and two above, three and four below), a play he often returned to for ref­er­ence in his own work.

Gins­berg Class Three

Gins­berg Class Four

Ginsberg’s method of teach­ing Shake­speare is unlike any­one else’s. He’s not inter­est­ed in exe­ge­sis so much as an open conversation—with the text, with his stu­dents, and with any ephemera that strikes his inter­est. It’s almost a kind of div­ina­tion by which Gins­berg teas­es out the “mes­sages” Shakespeare’s play sends through the ages, work­ing with the rhyth­mic and syn­tac­ti­cal odd­i­ties of indi­vid­ual lines instead of grand, abstract inter­pre­ta­tive frame­works. Ginsberg’s ped­a­gogy requires patience on the part of his stu­dents. He doesn’t dri­ve toward a point as much as arrive at it cir­cuitous­ly as by the chance oper­a­tions of his med­i­ta­tive mind. His first of four lec­tures above, for exam­ple, begins with a great deal of futz­ing around about dif­fer­ent edi­tions, which can seem a lit­tle tedious to an impa­tient lis­ten­er. Give in to the urge to fast-for­ward, though, and you’ll miss the dia­mond-like bits of wis­dom that emerge from Gins­berg’s dis­cur­sive explo­ration of minu­ti­ae.

Gins­berg explains to his class why he thinks the Pen­guin G.B. Har­ri­son edi­tion was the best avail­able at the time because it draws from the orig­i­nal folio and has “more respect than the actu­al arrange­ment of the lines for speak­ing as deter­mined by the edi­tions print­ed in Shakespeare’s day.” Harrison’s text, he says, recov­ers the idio­syn­crasies of Shakespeare’s lines: “Since [Alexan­der] Pope and [John] Dry­den and oth­ers messed with Shakespeare’s texts—straightened them out and mod­ern­ized them and improved them—they’ve always been repro­duced too smooth­ly.” Such was the hubris of Pope and Dry­den. Gins­berg spends a few min­utes “cor­rect­ing” the punc­tu­a­tion of a line for stu­dents with more mod­ern­ized edi­tions. One can see the appeal of the first folio for Gins­berg as he insists that its text is “not all exact­ly prop­er­ly lined up pen­ta­met­ric blank verse but is more bro­ken, more irreg­u­lar lines, more like free verse actu­al­ly, because it fit­ted exact­ly to speech.” Much like his own work in fact, and that of his fel­low Beats, whom he reads and draws into the dis­cus­sion of The Tem­pest’s poet­ics through­out the course of his lec­tures. The Allen Gins­berg Project has more on the poet­’s teach­ing of Shake­speare dur­ing his Naropa days.

When Gins­berg found­ed the Jack Ker­ouac School with Anne Wald­man in 1974, he and his fel­low Beats had not taught before. They sim­ply invent­ed their own ways of pass­ing on their poet­ic enlight­en­ment. Invit­ed to cre­ate the school at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty in Boul­der by his spir­i­tu­al teacher and Naropa founder Chogyam Trung­pa Rin­poche, Gins­berg seemed to com­bine in equal parts the Bud­dhist tra­di­tion of spir­i­tu­al lin­eage with that of West­ern lit­er­ary fil­i­a­tion. He dis­tilled this syn­the­sis in his ellip­ti­cal 1992 text “Mind Writ­ing Slo­gans,”: “two decades’ expe­ri­ence teach­ing poet­ics at Naropa Insti­tute” and a “half decade at Brook­lyn Col­lege,” Gins­berg writes, “boiled down to brief mot­toes from many sources found use­ful to guide myself and oth­ers in the expe­ri­ence of ‘writ­ing the mind.’” This doc­u­ment is an excel­lent source of Ginsberg’s eclec­tic wis­dom, as is his “Celes­tial Home­work” read­ing list for his class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats.”

Gins­berg and company’s rela­tion­ship to Trungpa’s Shamb­ha­la Bud­dhist school, and to the artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty of Boul­der, was not with­out its detrac­tors. Poet Ken­neth Rexroth and oth­ers accused Gins­berg and his teacher of a kind of cul­tic exploita­tion of Bud­dhist teach­ings, of “Bud­dhist fas­cism.” The con­flict between Ginsberg’s guru and poets like W.S. Merwin—who appar­ent­ly had a humil­i­at­ing expe­ri­ence at Naropa—is doc­u­ment­ed in Tom Clark’s polem­i­cal The Great Naropa Poet­ry Wars. Oth­ers remem­ber the Naropa founder much more fond­ly. Two doc­u­men­taries offer dif­fer­ent por­traits of life at Naropa. The first, Fried Shoes, Cooked Dia­monds (above)—filmed in 1978 and nar­rat­ed by Gins­berg himself—presents a raw, in-the-moment pic­ture of the anar­chic Ker­ouac School’s ear­ly days. For­mer Naropa stu­dent Kate Lindhardt’s “micro-bud­get” Crazy Wis­dom, below, offers a more detached look at the school and asks ques­tions about what she calls the “insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion” of cre­ativ­i­ty from a more fem­i­nist per­spec­tive.

Gins­berg’s Tem­pest course will be added to our col­lec­tion of 875 Free Online Cours­es; the films men­tioned above can be found in our col­lec­tion of 640 Free Movies Online. The Tem­pest and poems by Gins­berg can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

Allen Ginsberg’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spir­it: The Poet’s Final Days Cap­tured in a 1997 Film

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

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

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Watch a “Lost Interview” With Michel Foucault: Missing for 30 Years But Now Recovered

in Philosophy | March 28th, 2014

An intro­duc­to­ry shot that might be an out­take from A Clock­work Orange opens this inter­view with Michel Fou­cault, “lost,” we’re told by Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, “for near­ly 30 years” before it appeared on Youtube last week. In it, Fou­cault dis­cuss­es mad­ness and his inter­est in psy­chol­o­gy and psy­chopathol­o­gy, repeat­ing in brief the argu­ment he made in Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion, his 1961 work in which—through impres­sive feats of archival research and leaps of the imagination—Foucault attempt­ed, as he wrote in his pref­ace, “to return, in his­to­ry, to that zero point in the course of mad­ness at which mad­ness is an undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed expe­ri­ence, a not yet divid­ed expe­ri­ence of divi­sion itself.”

Fou­cault explains this the­sis more clear­ly above, point­ing out that until the 17th cen­tu­ry, so-called “mad” peo­ple lived and moved freely in Euro­pean soci­ety. Dur­ing the age of Enlight­en­ment, how­ev­er, they began to be shut up in asy­lums and hid­den away. And not only the dan­ger­ous­ly insane. “All social­ly worth­less peo­ple, the trou­ble­mak­ers,” says Fou­cault, “were impris­oned.” In the 19th cen­tu­ry, this phe­nom­e­non gave rise to the sci­en­tif­ic dis­course of psy­chi­a­try, and a rise in hos­pi­tals, san­i­tar­i­ums, work­hous­es, and vir­tu­al pris­ons for those under­stood to be men­tal­ly ill. “My the­sis is this, “says Fou­cault: “the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of our knowl­edge, has been acquired at the cost of exclu­sions, bans, denials, rejec­tions, at the price of a kind of cru­el­ty with regard to real­i­ty.”

Fou­cault gave the inter­view to artist and philoso­pher Fons Elders on Dutch TV in 1971 (the voice-over com­men­tary is in Dutch and untrans­lat­ed). Elders, you may recall, mod­er­at­ed a debate between Fou­cault and Noam Chom­sky short­ly after (and appar­ent­ly paid Fou­cault part­ly in hashish). He is rebuffed here for seek­ing per­son­al infor­ma­tion from his sub­ject: “Struc­tural­ists,” says Foucault—who along with Roland Barthes is cred­it­ed, crude­ly, with the “death of the author” thesis—“are peo­ple for whom what counts in essence are sys­tems of rela­tions and thus not at all the lived indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence of peo­ple.” Nev­er­the­less, Fou­cault says, “I don’t see what I’ve been talk­ing about for the past half an hour if not my per­son­al life.” He does so with­out reveal­ing any details, and there would be no need. In fact, Fou­cault agreed to the inter­view in a let­ter with the fol­low­ing stip­u­la­tions, which Elders reads after the intro­duc­tion.

Sir, I do not wish that dur­ing the tele­vi­sion broad­cast you want to devote to me, any bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion be giv­en any place. I con­sid­er indeed such infor­ma­tion to have no impor­tance for the sub­ject mat­ter at hand.

“Some have argued,” writes Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, “that Foucault’s work was, in a way, bio­graph­i­cal.” His depres­sion and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty marked him to doc­tors at the time as men­tal­ly ill and one of the exclud­ed. In many ways Foucault’s own life served as an exper­i­ment in rad­i­cal rejec­tion of the cat­e­gories assigned him and oth­er mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple, even in a soci­ety that thinks itself, he says, “very tol­er­ant.” After their debate that year, Chom­sky described Fou­cault as “total­ly amoral.” And yet, all of his work was pred­i­cat­ed on a refusal to accept cru­el­ty, sup­pres­sion, vio­lence, con­quest, and mass impris­on­ment as the cost of Euro­pean knowl­edge and pow­er. If that isn’t a moral posi­tion, I don’t know what is.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Michel Foucault’s Con­tro­ver­sial Life and Phi­los­o­phy Explored in a Reveal­ing 1993 Doc­u­men­tary

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

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

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Big Bang Big Boom: Graffiti Stop-Motion Animation Creatively Depicts the Evolution of Life

in Animation, Art, Biology, Science | March 27th, 2014

There’s a rapa­cious, run-amok ener­gy to Ital­ian street artist Blu’s stop motion ani­ma­tion, “BIG BANG BIG BOOM.” How­ev­er long it took him, assist­ed by a slew of local artists, to ren­der a host of paint­ed large-scale char­ac­ters across a pri­mar­i­ly indus­tri­al land­scape in Argenti­na and Uruguay, it takes less than ten, glo­ri­ous­ly grit­ty min­utes for his just-dawned world to destroy itself.

This is evo­lu­tion at its most apoc­ryphal (and least sci­en­tif­ic). Crus­taceans and giant lizards who mere decades ago would have ter­ror­ized the streets of Tokyo are here no match for man. In fact, man is no match for man, rapid­ly engi­neer­ing his own demise as he chas­es about an appro­pri­ate­ly cir­cu­lar, aban­doned-look­ing silo.

The nec­es­sary demise of his murals—animation frames, if you like—serves as a nifty reminder of the evo­lu­tion­ary fate of most street art. A Banksy care­ful­ly pre­served beneath Plexi is the excep­tion, and even that is no guar­an­tee of per­ma­nence. Case in point, New York City’s leg­endary “insti­tute of high­er burn­ing,” 5 Pointz, whose 200,000-square-feet were recent­ly white­washed into noth­ing­ness overnight.

Boom indeed.

 Relat­ed Con­tent:

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Obey the Giant: Short Film Presents the True Sto­ry of Shep­ard Fairey’s First Act of Street Art

Artists Paint Paris, Berlin and Lon­don with High-Tech Video Graf­fi­ti

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

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Richard Feynman on Religion, Science, the Search for Truth & Our Willingness to Live with Doubt

in Religion, Science, Television | March 27th, 2014

A com­plete­ly unsur­pris­ing thing has hap­pened dur­ing the first sea­son of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cos­mos reboot. Cre­ation­ists vocal­ly com­plained that the show does not give their point of view an equal hear­ing. Tyson respond­ed, say­ing “you don’t talk about the spher­i­cal earth with NASA and then say let’s give equal time to the flat-earth­ers.” The anal­o­gy is more amus­ing than effec­tive, since rough­ly fifty per­cent of Amer­i­cans are Cre­ation­ists, while per­haps 49.9 per­cent few­er believe the earth is flat. But the point stands. If sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries were arrived at by pop­u­lar vote, the “equal time” argu­ment might make some sense. Of course that’s not how sci­ence works. Is this bias? As Tyson put it in one of his well-craft­ed tweets, “you are not biased any time you ever speak the truth.”

“But what is truth?” asks a cer­tain kind of skep­tic. That, sug­gests the late Nobel prize-win­ning physi­cist Richard Feyn­man above, depends upon your method. If you’re doing sci­ence, you may find answers, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly the ones you want:

If you expect­ed sci­ence to give all the answers to the won­der­ful ques­tions about what we are, where we’re going, what the mean­ing of the uni­verse is and so on, then I think you can eas­i­ly become dis­il­lu­sioned and look for some mys­tic answer.

Going to the sci­ences, says Feyn­man, to “get an answer to some deep philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion,” means “you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that ques­tion by find­ing out more about the char­ac­ter of nature.” Sci­ence does not begin with answers, but with doubt: “Is sci­ence true? No, no we don’t know what’s true, we’re try­ing to find out.” Feynman’s sci­en­tif­ic atti­tude is pro­found­ly agnos­tic; he’d rather “live with doubt than have answers that might be wrong.”

Feyn­man couch­es his com­ments in per­son­al terms, admit­ting there are sci­en­tists who have reli­gious faith, or as he puts it “mys­tic answers,” and that he “doesn’t under­stand that.” He declines to say any­thing more. While sim­i­lar­ly agnos­tic, Neil deGrasse Tyson states his opin­ions a bit more force­ful­ly on sci­en­tists who are believ­ers, say­ing that around one third of “ful­ly-func­tion­ing” “Western/American sci­en­tists claim that there is a god to whom they pray.” Yet unlike the claims of Answers in Gen­e­sis and oth­er Cre­ation­ist out­fits, “There is no exam­ple of some­one read­ing their scrip­ture and say­ing, ‘I have a pre­dic­tion about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let’s go test that pre­dic­tion,’ and have the pre­dic­tion be cor­rect.”

Both Feyn­man and Tyson seem to agree that the sci­en­tif­ic and Cre­ation­ist meth­ods for dis­cov­er­ing “truth,” what­ev­er that may be, are basi­cal­ly incom­pat­i­ble. Says Feyn­man: “There are very remark­able mys­ter­ies… but those are mys­ter­ies I want to inves­ti­gate with­out know­ing the answers to them.” For that rea­son, says Feyn­man, he “can’t believe the spe­cial sto­ries that have been made up about our rela­tion­ship to the uni­verse.” His word­ing recalls the phrase Answers in Gen­e­sis uses to char­ac­ter­ize human ori­gins: “spe­cial cre­ation,” the descrip­tion of a method that places mean­ing and val­ue before evi­dence, and dogged­ly assumes to know the truth about what it sets out to inves­ti­gate in igno­rance.

Con­front­ed with the Cre­ation­ists of today, Feyn­man would like­ly lump them in with what he called in a 1974 Cal­tech com­mence­ment speech “Car­go Cult Sci­ence,” or “sci­ence that isn’t sci­ence” but that intim­i­dates “ordi­nary peo­ple with com­mon­sense ideas.” That lec­ture appears in a col­lec­tion of Feynman’s speech­es, lec­tures, inter­views and arti­cles called The Plea­sure of Find­ing Things Out, which also hap­pens to be the title of the pro­gram from which the clip at the top comes.

Pro­duced by the BBC in 1981, the hour-long inter­view was taped for a show called Hori­zon which, like Cos­mos, show­cas­es sci­en­tists shar­ing the joys of dis­cov­ery with a lay audi­ence. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan before him, Feyn­man was a very lik­able and accom­plished sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor. He had lit­tle time for phi­los­o­phy, but his prac­tice of the sci­en­tif­ic method is unim­peach­able. Of the Feyn­man TV spe­cial above, Nobel Prize-win­ning chemist Sir Har­ry Kro­to remarked: “The 1981 Feyn­man-Hori­zon is the best sci­ence pro­gram I have ever seen. This is not just my opin­ion — it is also the opin­ion of many of the best sci­en­tists that I know who have seen the pro­gram… It should be manda­to­ry view­ing for all stu­dents whether they be sci­ence or arts stu­dents.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

Richard Feyn­man Intro­duces the World to Nan­otech­nol­o­gy with Two Sem­i­nal Lec­tures (1959 & 1984)

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

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Julia Child Shows How to Edit Videotape with a Meat Cleaver, and Cook Meat with a Blow Torch

in Food & Drink, Television | March 27th, 2014

Julia Child changed the way Amer­i­cans eat. Before Julia, French cook­ing was seen as some­thing reserved sole­ly for fine restau­rants. Recipes for home-cooked meals stressed hygiene and con­ve­nience over fresh­ness and taste. Thus, as was the case at my grandmother’s house, din­ner would often involve a pork chop cooked with­in an inch of its life and a hor­rif­ic jel­lo sal­ad con­coc­tion.

But with the launch of her huge­ly influ­en­tial PBS TV show, The French Chef (1963–1973), Julia Child start­ed to change America’s mind about what good food is and how it should be pre­pared. It’s hard to imag­ine the recent food­ie rev­o­lu­tion with its empha­sis on sea­son­al, fresh ingre­di­ents with­out Child.

While the series was a show­case for her cook­ing prowess — honed by years of train­ing at the pres­ti­gious Le Cor­don Bleu and with some of France’s most famous mas­ter chefs – Child’s play­ful, eccen­tric per­son­al­i­ty is what turned the show into a hit. The French Chef was video­taped live from start to fin­ish, so every screw up was record­ed for pos­ter­i­ty. And yet those mis­takes — along with her par­tic­u­lar way of speak­ing and her endur­ing love of wine — endeared her to the audi­ence. She was always poised, resource­ful and sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny.

You can see that sense of humor on dis­play in the video above, which was made for the staff’s hol­i­day par­ty just after the show pre­miered. With tongue square­ly in cheek, Child demon­strates how to edit video with mask­ing tape and a meat clever. (Note: do not edit video­tape with mask­ing tape and a meat cleaver.) When asked by her inter­view­er (in this slight­ly longer ver­sion here) whether the tape she was using was spe­cial, Child retorts, “Well, it’s just a nice sticky tape.”

Anoth­er exam­ple of Child’s keen sense of humor, along with her skills with a blow torch, is this late 1980s appear­ance on Late Night with David Let­ter­man. Child orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed on show­ing Let­ter­man how to make a ham­burg­er, but when the hot plate failed to work, she quick­ly impro­vised a brand new dish – beef tartare grat­iné.

via @WFMU & The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Remem­ber­ing Julia Child on Her 100th Birth­day with Her Clas­sic Appear­ance on the Let­ter­man Show

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Cui­sine All at Once (Free Online Course)

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Har­vard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in a Unique Free Online Course

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Harvard’s Free Computer Science Course Teaches You to Code in 12 Weeks

in Harvard, How to Learn for Free, MOOCs, Technology | March 27th, 2014

At the begin­ning of last year, we wrote about CS50, Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Com­put­er Sci­ence course, taught by Pro­fes­sor David Malan. Today, we bring you the updat­ed ver­sion of the class, filmed through­out the past semes­ter at Har­vard. Why revis­it an updat­ed ver­sion of the same class a year lat­er? For one thing, the mate­r­i­al has been updat­ed. And, as you can tell by the rous­ing recep­tion Malan receives from the audi­ence at the start of the first lec­ture (above), Malan is kind of a big deal. From his open­ing boom of “This is CS50,” Malan imme­di­ate­ly comes off as an unusu­al­ly charis­mat­ic pro­fes­sor. He offers what might just be the most engag­ing online class you’ve ever seen.

So what does this charis­mat­ic com­put­er sci­en­tist cov­er over three months? An impres­sive­ly large amount of infor­ma­tion about cod­ing. Malan builds the course from the ground up, and begins by describ­ing how tran­sis­tors are employed to trans­mit infor­ma­tion with­in com­put­ers. From then on, he out­lines a vast amount of com­put­er sci­ence in high­ly acces­si­ble lan­guage. This will almost undoubt­ed­ly be the clear­est pre­sen­ta­tion of top­ics like “com­mand-line argu­ments,” “cryp­tog­ra­phy,” and “dynam­ic mem­o­ry allo­ca­tion” that you’re like­ly to hear.

The class videos are avail­able on iTune­sU, YouTube, and in audio, 1080p HD video, and text tran­script form on a crisp course web­site. The course may also be accessed through edX, Har­vard and MIT’s MOOC plat­form, which allows users to receive a cer­tifi­cate upon com­ple­tion. It’s easy to tell that Malan and his team have gone above and beyond the require­ments of cre­at­ing a help­ful intro­duc­tion to com­put­er sci­ence. They deliv­er an astound­ing­ly easy-to-grasp primer on a daunt­ing top­ic.

For oth­er Comp­Sci class­es taught by David Malan, check out our list of Free Com­put­er Sci­ence cours­es, part of our larg­er list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­put­er Sci­ence: Free Cours­es

Codecademy’s Free Cours­es Democ­ra­tize Com­put­er Pro­gram­ming

Learn to Build iPhone & iPad Apps with Stanford’s Free Course, Cod­ing Togeth­er

 

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What Does a $45 Million Viola Sound Like? Violist David Aaron Carpenter Gives You a Preview

in Music | March 26th, 2014

This spring, one of the best-pre­served Strads in exis­tence will go up for auc­tion at Sotheby’s. Built some time between 1700 and 1720, dur­ing the very best peri­od of Stradivari’s work, the vio­la is a real rar­i­ty, one of only ten in exis­tence. Maybe that jus­ti­fies the start­ing price of $45 mil­lion. What does that prized strad actu­al­ly sound like, you might won­der? Filmed by The New York Times, the clip above fea­tures David Aaron Car­pen­ter (called “The Hottest Vio­list of the 21st Cen­tu­ry”) play­ing Suite No. 3 in C by Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach. If you’re a vio­la afi­ciona­do, we would be curi­ous to get your take on what you hear.

via NYTimes

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art and Sci­ence of Vio­lin Mak­ing

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

A Stringed Salute to AC/DC and Guns N’ Ros­es

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Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre Shooting a Gun in Their First Photo Together (1929)

in Philosophy, Photography | March 26th, 2014

simone-de-beauvoir-jean-paul-sartre-fairground-at-porte-d_orlc3a9ans-1929

In late 2012, an exhi­bi­tion called Shoot! Exis­ten­tial Pho­tog­ra­phy was held in Lon­don. And it traced the his­to­ry of an unusu­al attrac­tion that start­ed appear­ing in Euro­pean fair­grounds after World War I — the pho­to­graph­ic shoot­ing gallery. It worked some­thing like this: A con­tes­tant paid a lit­tle mon­ey, and tried to hit the cen­ter of a tar­get with a gun. If he or she hit the tar­get, a cam­era took a pho­to, and instead of win­ning a lit­tle toy, the con­tes­tant received a snap­shot of him or her­self shoot­ing the gun. Accord­ing to the exhi­bi­tion, this side-show “fas­ci­nat­ed many artists and intel­lec­tu­als in its hey­day, includ­ing Simone de Beau­voir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Man Ray and Lee Miller.” You can see a gallery of pho­tos here. But above, we have a pic­ture of de Beau­voir and Sartre at the shoot­ing gallery togeth­er. Tak­en at the Porte d’Or­léans fair­ground in Paris in June, 1929 — the same year the young philoso­phers met — this pho­to­graph is, accord­ing to the blog Avec Beau­voir, the cou­ple’s first pic­ture togeth­er. Do note that de Beau­voir appar­ent­ly hit the tar­get with her eyes closed. You can click the image to see it in a larg­er for­mat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lovers and Philoso­phers — Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Togeth­er in 1967

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Philosophy’s Pow­er Cou­ple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir, Fea­tured in 1967 TV Inter­view

Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

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Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Wonderful World of Post Soviet Russian Animation

in Film | March 26th, 2014

Back dur­ing the wan­ing years of the Sovi­et Union, ani­ma­tor Alek­san­dr Tatarsky left the state-run stu­dio Écran to form his own ani­ma­tion com­pa­ny called Stu­dio Pilot, the first pri­vate­ly owned com­pa­ny of its kind in Rus­sia. The stu­dio quick­ly made a name for itself by turn­ing out bizarre, sur­re­al and, at times, down­right dis­turb­ing ani­mat­ed shorts. If you went to ani­ma­tion fes­ti­vals dur­ing the Clin­ton pres­i­den­cy, you prob­a­bly saw some­thing from Stu­dio Pilot.

Metafil­ter user “Nomyte,” who clear­ly knows both ani­ma­tion and Russ­ian, put togeth­er an exhaus­tive list of movies on Youtube from Stu­dio Pilot.  A whop­ping 17 hours of footage. Here are a few favorites:

His Wife is a Chick­en (1989) — A sur­re­al­ist domes­tic dra­ma tale about a guy who rejects his lov­ing, hard­work­ing wife when he real­izes that, well, she’s a chick­en. Told com­plete­ly with­out words, the film (shown above) mas­ter­ful­ly fus­es every­day banal­i­ty with some tru­ly unnerv­ing bits of weird­ness – like that hor­rif­ic worm dog crea­ture with a human face. I saw this movie at some point in the ear­ly ‘90s and it gave me night­mares.

The Coup  (1991) – An ani­mat­ed polit­i­cal car­toon that — 20 some odd years lat­er — has become a fas­ci­nat­ing his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment. The short shows a svelte Boris Yeltsin lit­er­al­ly flush away the lead­ers of the doomed 1991 coup attempt­ed against Mikhail Gor­bachev. The inci­dent was the last gasp of the Sovi­et old guard; its fail­ure result­ed in the even­tu­al dis­so­lu­tion of the USSR. As the film’s end title points out, all of the short’s ani­ma­tors were per­son­al­ly involved in fight­ing the coup: “From 19 to 21 of August 1991, all ani­ma­tors who made this film have been [sic] defend­ing the white house of Rus­sia. Only by night on August 21 they could start work­ing on the film.”

Gone with the Wind (1998) – Noth­ing about romance dur­ing the Civ­il War here. Instead, this movie is about, once again, a chick­en. The short ani­ma­tion is a macabre tale about a boiled bird that comes back from the dead and strug­gles to return to its orig­i­nal unplucked state. You won’t look at eggs in quite the same way again.

2+1= (2003) – A light­heart­ed com­e­dy about dinosaurs in love.

If you want to see the com­plete list of Stu­dio Pilot ani­ma­tions, check it out here. Many more great ani­mat­ed shorts can be found on our list of Free Ani­mat­ed Films, part of our big­ger col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Two Beau­ti­ful­ly-Craft­ed Russ­ian Ani­ma­tions of Chekhov’s Clas­sic Children’s Sto­ry “Kash­tan­ka”

Watch Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Win­nie the Pooh, Cre­at­ed by the Inno­v­a­tive Ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Watch Six TED-Style Lectures from Top Harvard Profs Presented at Harvard Thinks Big 5

in Harvard, TED Talks | March 26th, 2014

Har­vard has a few propo­si­tions it would like you con­sid­er. Take, for exam­ple, the one expound­ed on above by Robert Lue, whose titles include Pro­fes­sor of the Prac­tice of Mol­e­c­u­lar and Cel­lu­lar Biol­o­gy, Richard L. Men­schel Fac­ul­ty Direc­tor of the Derek Bok Cen­ter for Teach­ing and Learn­ing, and the fac­ul­ty direc­tor of Har­vardX. As an Open Cul­ture read­er, you might have some expe­ri­ence with that last institution—or, rather, dig­i­tal institution—which releas­es Har­vard-cal­iber learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties free in the form of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (or MOOCs). You’ll find some of them on our very own reg­u­lar­ly-updat­ed col­lec­tion of MOOCs from great uni­ver­si­ties. Per­haps you haven’t enjoyed tak­ing one, but you may well do it soon. What, though, does their increas­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty mean for uni­ver­si­ties, one of the old­est of the tra­di­tion­al indus­tries we so often speak of the inter­net “dis­rupt­ing”? Lue, who offers eight and a half min­utes of the choic­est words on the sub­ject, would like you to con­sid­er the MOOC’s moment not one of dis­rup­tion for the uni­ver­si­ty, but one of “inflec­tion, and ulti­mate­ly a moment of poten­tial trans­for­ma­tion.”

Lue’s argu­ment comes laid out in one of the six brief but sharp lec­tures from Har­vard Thinks Big 5, the lat­est round of the famed uni­ver­si­ty’s series of TED-style talks where “a col­lec­tion of all-star pro­fes­sors each speak for ten min­utes about some­thing they are pas­sion­ate about.” Jef­frey Miron, Senior Lec­tur­er and Direc­tor of Under­grad­u­ate Stud­ies in the Depart­ment of Eco­nom­ics and senior fel­low at the Cato Insti­tute, has a pas­sion for drug legal­iza­tion. In his talk just above, Miron tells us why we should recon­sid­er our assump­tions about the ben­e­fits of any kind of drug pro­hi­bi­tion — or at least, the ben­e­fits we just seem to assume it brings. And as we rethink our posi­tions on the role of gov­ern­ment in drug use and tech­nol­o­gy in the uni­ver­si­ty, why not also rethink the role of large news orga­ni­za­tions — and large orga­ni­za­tions of any kind — in our lives? Below, Nic­co Mele, Adjunct Lec­tur­er in Pub­lic Pol­i­cy at the Shoren­stein Cen­ter at Har­vard’s Kennedy School, explains why all kinds of pow­er, from man­u­fac­tur­ing san­dals all the way up to gath­er­ing news, has and will con­tin­ue to devolve from insti­tu­tions to indi­vid­u­als.

The rest of the Har­vard Thinks Big 5 line­up includes Senior Lec­tur­er on Edu­ca­tion Kather­ine K. Mer­seth advo­cat­ing careers in teach­ing,  Pro­fes­sor of Mol­e­c­u­lar and Cel­lu­lar Biol­o­gy Jeff Licht­man advo­cat­ing “chang­ing the wiring in your brain,” and African Amer­i­can Stud­ies pro­fes­sor and Hiphop Archive at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty found­ing direc­tor Mar­cyliena Mor­gan advo­cat­ing a rich­er study of what grown-ups used to call, with a groan, “rap music.” You can read more about the talks and the pro­fes­sors giv­ing them at the Crim­son, before watch­ing and decid­ing whether to agree with them, dis­agree with them, or sim­ply con­sid­er — in oth­er words, to think. The videos are also avail­able on iTune­sU.

Kather­ine K. Mer­seth

Jeff Licht­man

Mar­cyliena Mor­gan

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

Har­vard Thinks Green: Big Ideas from 6 All-Star Envi­ron­ment Profs

Har­vard Thinks Big 4 Offers TED-Style Talks on Stats, Milk, and Traf­fic-Direct­ing Mimes

Har­vard Thinks Big 2012: 8 All-Star Pro­fes­sors. 8 Big Ideas

Har­vard Thinks Big 2010

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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