Metallica Playing “Enter Sandman” on Classroom Toy Instruments

in Music | November 17th, 2016

Things get­ting too seri­ous around here? You want it lighter? Here’s Metal­li­ca play­ing “Enter Sand­man” on class­room toy instru­ments. It fea­tures James Het­field on the toy clar­inet, Lars Ulrich on the Fish­er Price Drum and toy cym­bals, Kirk Ham­mett on the Melod­i­ca, and Robert Tru­jil­lo on the Baby Elec­tric Axe. They’re joined by Jim­my Fal­lon on the kazoo. Next up, stun­ning, breath­tak­ing time­lapse films of boats sail­ing through Venet­ian canals.

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

Metallica’s Bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo Plays Metal­li­ca Songs Fla­men­co-Style, Joined by Rodri­go y Gabriela

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

A Blue­grass Ver­sion of Metallica’s Heavy Met­al Hit, “Enter Sand­man”

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Interview: Recorded by David Remnick of The New Yorker

in Music | November 14th, 2016

Image by Rama, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We’ve heard very few details about Leonard Cohen’s death this week, and that is by design. The Cohen fam­i­ly request­ed pri­va­cy for his funer­al and received it. While most out­lets report­ed that he passed away on Thurs­day night, he actu­al­ly died on Wednes­day and was buried on Thurs­day. This col­lec­tive gra­cious­ness on the part of the press comes, I’d say, at a time when lit­tle grace abounds. Grace is a word that I par­tic­u­lar­ly asso­ciate with Cohen. He was a grace­ful man, always impec­ca­bly coiffed and dressed (his father was a tai­lor), his hand­some, hang­dog face nev­er any­thing but per­fect­ly direct.

For sev­er­al days before his death, New York­er edi­tor David Rem­nick sat down with Cohen for the first inter­view he’d giv­en in sev­er­al years. The poet and folk singer/songwriter leg­end had ter­mi­nal can­cer, we learn, and was con­fined to a med­ical chair. Nonethe­less, says Rem­nick, intro­duc­ing the edit­ed audio inter­view below, Cohen was “in an ebul­lient mood for a man… who knew exact­ly where he was going, and he was head­ed there in a hur­ry. And at the same time, he was incred­i­bly gra­cious. The most gra­cious host this side of my moth­er.” Cut to Cohen offer­ing him a few slices of cheese, and Rem­i­nick declin­ing.

Cohen kept his ill­ness secret (though he made allu­sions to it in a let­ter to his dying girl­friend Mar­i­anne this past sum­mer). Rem­nick reveals that he record­ed almost the entire­ty of his incred­i­ble final album You Want It Dark­er while con­fined to that chair. His voice rubbed raw with age, like John­ny Cash’s in his Amer­i­can Record­ings ses­sions, Cohen’s last songs car­ry all the spir­i­tu­al urgency and ragged vig­or of the best work of his career. Where did it come from? Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the first sub­ject in Rem­nick­’s inter­view is death. Cohen has been writ­ing about death since his first album in 1967.

He begins with his father’s death when he was nine, “a kind of ori­gin sto­ry for his career as a writer.”

The funer­al was held in our house. When we came down the stairs, the cof­fin was in the liv­ing room. And it was open. It was win­ter, you know. And I was think­ing, like, it must be hard to dig.

Remem­ber­ing this scene, Cohen’s Mon­tre­al accent strength­ens, then relax­es as he describes how, after the funer­al, he went to his father’s clos­et, cut a bow tie in half, wrote “some kind of farewell to my father” on the wing of the tie, and buried it in the back­yard. “It was just some attrac­tion to a rit­u­al response,” he says, “to an impos­si­ble event.”

This trag­ic vignette, and Cohen’s reflec­tion on it, is, as Rem­nick says, like a super­hero ori­gin sto­ry. With the same mea­sured, rhyth­mic voice and clear expres­sions as his songs, Cohen con­nects the mor­tal to the mys­te­ri­ous­ly divine act of writ­ing, which accom­plish­es “some kind of farewell” whose effects are unknown to us. What pos­si­ble sig­nif­i­cance the act had for Cohen, he can­not say, but it was sim­ply the appro­pri­ate response. Cohen’s final album seemed to be the right response to his own death.

This dwelling on mor­tal­i­ty is of course huge­ly sig­nif­i­cant and in the fore­ground of this inter­view-slash-trib­ute from Rem­nick, but it isn’t a mor­bid piece at all. In a ret­ro­spec­tive of Cohen’s career, we learn how he went from an acclaimed but strug­gling poet and nov­el­ist to folk singer in 1967, and how crip­pling stage fright led to him drink­ing three bot­tles of wine before he per­formed. At a 1972 con­cert in Israel, Cohen apol­o­gized, left the stage part­way through a song, and dropped two hits of acid in his dress­ing room. The audi­ence began singing loud­ly, and he returned to sing “So Long, Mar­i­anne” while hal­lu­ci­nat­ing wild­ly.

The sto­ry is hilar­i­ous, told with the same dry wit that under­cuts all of Cohen’s obser­va­tions about sex, death, and God. For all the deep­ness we asso­ciate with Leonard Cohen, says Rem­nick, he seemed reluc­tant to ana­lyze his work in reli­gious terms. But when he does open up about it, he gives us a back­drop against which to under­stand much of his spir­i­tu­al phi­los­o­phy: prayers, he says, “are to remind God, it was once a har­mo­nious uni­ty.… “ as well as his writ­ing phi­los­o­phy: “I only know,” says Cohen, “that if I write enough vers­es, and keep dis­card­ing the slo­gans, even the hip ones, even the sub­tle ones, that some­thing will emerge that rep­re­sents.”

You can also lis­ten to Remnick’s New York­er Radio Hour pod­cast at the WNYC site (and above) and read Remnick’s arti­cle on his last meet­ings with Cohen at The New York­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Cohen Has Passed at Age 82: His New and Now Final Album Is Stream­ing Free Online

Leonard Cohen Plays a Spell­bind­ing Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

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

Carl Sagan’s Ambitious College Reading List: Plato, Shakespeare, Gide, and Plenty of Philosophy, Math & Physics (1954)

in Books, Science | November 14th, 2016

Carl Sagan may have passed away almost twen­ty years ago, but he con­tin­ues to influ­ence minds of all gen­er­a­tions through intel­lec­tu­al heirs like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (host of the remake of Sagan’s beloved 1980 TV series Cos­mos) as well as through the books he wrote in his life­time. But what books influ­enced Sagan, launch­ing him on the jour­ney toward astron­o­my, cos­mol­o­gy, astro­physics, astro­bi­ol­o­gy, and glob­al celebri­ty? Thanks to the Library of Con­gress’ Carl Sagan Archive, we now know at least forty titles from the no doubt volu­mi­nous amount of read­ing mate­r­i­al he digest­ed dur­ing his youth and edu­ca­tion.

Sagan wrote this read­ing list (which a fan has tran­scribed with links and post­ed to Red­dit) in 1954, as an under­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. On it he iden­ti­fies the books, as a young Charles Dar­win once wrote on his own list, to be read, whether whol­ly, par­tial­ly, or as a part of his course­work:

In Whole

• The Immoral­ist — Andre Gide
• Death, Be Not Proud — John Gun­ther
• Out­line of Abnor­mal Psy­chol­o­gy - Gard­ner Mur­phy
• Who Speaks For Man — Nor­man Cousins
• Astron­o­my — Robert Bak­er
• Obser­va­tion­al Approach to Cos­mol­o­gy — Robert Hub­ble
• Can­cer
• Quan­ti­ta­tive Aspects of Car­cino­genic Radi­a­tion — Harold Thay­er Davis
• Star Short Sci­ence Fic­tion Nov­els #1
• New Biol­o­gy #15
• Young Archimedes — Aldous Hux­ley
• Julius Cae­sar — Shake­speare
• Sym­po­sium — Pla­to
• Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of An Une­d­u­cat­ed Man — Hutchins
• Timaeus — Pla­to

In Part

• Extra­or­di­nary Pop­u­lar Delu­sions — Charles MacK­ay
• But We Were Born Free — Elmer Davis
• Read­ings In Phi­los­o­phy
• His­to­ry of West­ern Phi­los­o­phy — W.T. Jones
• The Greek Read­er — W.H. Auden
• In the Mat­ter of J. Robert Oppen­heimer
• The Berlitz Ger­man Self-Teacher
• Sig­ma Galax­ies
• The Uses of the Past — Her­bert J. Muller
• Short Sto­ries for Study
• The Repub­lic — Pla­to
• The Bible — Anony­mous
• Sev­er­al Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­cans

Course Read­ings:

• Heat and Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics - Mark Wal­do Zeman­sky
• Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, Kinet­ic The­o­ry, Sta­tis­ti­cal The­o­ry - Fran­cis W. Sears
• Kinet­ic The­o­ry of Gas­es — E.H. Ken­nard
• Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics: An Advanced Treat­ment — E.A. Guggen­heim
• Elec­tric­i­ty and Elec­tro­mag­net­ism — Horn­well
• The­o­ry of Func­tions (5 Vol­umes) — Kon­rad Knopp
• Advanced Cal­cu­lus (in part) — Wil­fred Kaplan
• Com­plex Analy­sis — Lars Ahlfors
• Vol. II, Dif­fer­en­tial and Inte­gral Cal­cu­lus — Richard Courant (Author)
• Elec­tric Fields — Rugers 
• Elec­tro­mag­net­ics — John Daniel Kraus
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cir­cuit Fun­da­men­tals — Carl Edwin Smith

Pret­ty ambi­tious mate­r­i­al for a twen­ty-year-old, but remem­ber: we’re talk­ing about some­one who, around a decade ear­li­er, had already sketched out his ideas for human­i­ty’s space­far­ing future. It makes sense that such a child would grow up to read sci­ence fic­tion — and with the pub­li­ca­tion of Con­tact thir­ty years after that, write it — and even that he would take up math­e­mat­ics and physics as a course of aca­d­e­m­ic study.

But it takes a mind like Sagan’s not to lose sight of the impor­tance of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the non­spe­cial­ist pub­lic, as evi­denced by the pres­ence on his list of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can and Extra­or­di­nary Pop­u­lar Delu­sions. Nor did he neglect, even before his career began, the need to con­tex­tu­al­ize sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies in the realm of human thought and feel­ing, which extends from Pla­to and the Bible to Shake­speare, André Gide, and John Gun­ther — that last writer’s work, and cer­tain oth­er vol­umes on his list, also show­ing an advanced con­scious­ness of human lim­i­ta­tions and mor­tal­i­ty. All of it placed Sagan well, despite his trun­cat­ed time on Earth, to do work that will out­last us all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Carl Sagan’s Child­hood Sketch­es of The Future of Space Trav­el

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Mar­i­jua­na (1969)

New Carl Sagan Archive Fea­tures His Dig­i­tized Home Movies, Stu­dent Jour­nal­ism, Draft of His Pale Blue Dot & More

What Did Charles Dar­win Read? See His Hand­writ­ten Read­ing List & Read Books from His Library Online

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

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.

Decoding the Screenplays of The Shining, Moonrise Kingdom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screenplay

in Film, Writing | November 3rd, 2016

“A screen­play isn’t meant to be read,” said no less a direct­ing-screen­writ­ing auteur than Stan­ley Kubrick. “It’s to be real­ized on film.” The quote comes up in “The Shin­ing — Qui­et­ly Going Insane Togeth­er,” an episode of the video essay series Lessons from the Screen­play. Cre­ator Michael Tuck­er uses it to explain his lack of access to the actu­al “shoot­ing script” of the film, mean­ing the sort of script typ­i­cal­ly writ­ten before pro­duc­tion and then more or less adhered to on set. But Kubrick worked dif­fer­ent­ly. On his projects “the words of the script and the design of the film were cre­at­ed togeth­er.” (Or as star Jack Nichol­son says in a bit of archival footage, “I quit usin’ my script. I just take the ones they type up each day.”)

Tuck­er goes on to break down The Shin­ing’s writ­ing process in a way that will fas­ci­nate not just screen­writ­ers but any­one with an inter­est in artis­tic struc­ture, begin­ning with the seg­men­ta­tion implied by the film’s mem­o­rably stark title cards: “THE INTERVIEW,” “THURSDAY,” “8am,” and so on. He does this in ser­vice of one impor­tant over­ar­ch­ing ques­tion: “What, exact­ly is so creepy about The Shin­ing?” (I’ve been ask­ing it myself ever since watch­ing it at a Hal­loween par­ty near­ly twen­ty years ago.) In “Moon­rise King­dom: Where Sto­ry Meets Style” he gets into the ques­tion of what sto­ry­telling func­tions Ander­son­’s sig­na­ture abun­dance of vivid, whim­si­cal, or askew details per­form, and how they do it effec­tive­ly.

As far as what makes Christo­pher Nolan’s sec­ond Bat­man movie The Dark Knight work so well, Tuck­er has the answer in two words: the Jok­er. Dif­fer­ent actors have por­trayed Bat­man’s most famous rival with dif­fer­ent lev­els of effec­tive­ness, with Heath Ledger’s Jok­er gen­er­al­ly acknowl­edged as the Jok­er, or at least one of the Jok­ers, to beat. But like any char­ac­ter, this Jok­er began on the page, and in “The Dark Knight — Cre­at­ing the Ulti­mate Antag­o­nist,” we learn which screen­writ­ing guru-approved qual­i­ties instilled there give him so much pow­er: his excep­tion­al skill at attack­ing Bat­man’s weak­ness­es, how he pres­sures Bat­man into dif­fi­cult choic­es, and how he and Bat­man ulti­mate­ly com­pete for the same goal, the soul of Gotham, and become two sides of the same coin.

You can learn oth­er lessons that Tuck­er draws from the screen­plays of movies like Night­crawler, Gone Girl, Inde­pen­dence Day, Ghost­busters, and a two-parter on Amer­i­can Beau­ty. While ele­ments of cin­e­ma like the direct­ing, the act­ing, the edit­ing, and even the music might cap­ture our atten­tion more aggres­sive­ly, we should­n’t for­get that every nar­ra­tive film, large or small, tra­di­tion­al or uncon­ven­tion­al, grows from words some­one wrote down. “It’s not what a movie is about,” declared Roger Ebert, “it’s how it is about it” — and the deci­sions of how to be about it hap­pen in the screen­play.

via The Over­look Hotel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

10 Tips From Bil­ly Wilder on How to Write a Good Screen­play

Woody Allen’s Type­writer, Scis­sors and Sta­pler: The Great Film­mak­er Shows Us How He Writes

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

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.

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

in Film, Sci Fi | November 2nd, 2016

Image of Kuro­sawa and Tarkovsky via NPR

Though Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Andrei Tarkovsky occu­py the same plane in the pan­theon of auteurs — the high­est one — nei­ther their lives nor their films had much obvi­ous­ly in com­mon. The old­er, longer-lived Kuro­sawa start­ed his career ear­li­er and end­ed it lat­er, but dur­ing those cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly glo­ri­ous decades of the 1960s and 70s, the two brought into the world such pic­tures as Yojim­bo, Ivan’s Child­hood, High and Low, Red Beard, Andrei Rublev, Dodesukaden, Solaris, The Mir­ror, Der­su Uza­la (Kuro­sawa’s sole Japan­ese-Sovi­et co-pro­duc­tion, though Tarkovsky was­n’t involved), and Stalk­er.

They actu­al­ly met around the mid­dle of that peri­od, when Kuro­sawa came to vis­it the set of Solaris (watch Solaris online along with many oth­er major Tarkovsky films). “Tarkovsky guid­ed me around the set, explain­ing to me as cheer­ful­ly as a young boy who is giv­en a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty to show some­one his favorite toy­box,” Kuro­sawa writes in an essay orig­i­nal­ly run in the Asahi Shin­bun in 1977 and repub­lished at Cinephil­ia & Beyond.

“[Direc­tor Sergei] Bon­darchuk, who came with me, asked him about the cost of the set, and left his eyes wide open when Tarkovsky answered it. The cost was so huge: about six hun­dred mil­lion yen as to make Bon­darchuk, who direct­ed that grand spec­ta­cle of a movie War and Peace, agape in won­der.”

But the work, as Kuro­sawa soon found out, mer­it­ed the cost and then some:

Mar­velous progress in sci­ence we have been enjoy­ing, but where will it lead human­i­ty after all? Sheer fear­ful emo­tion this film suc­ceeds in con­jur­ing up in our soul. With­out it, a sci­ence fic­tion movie would be noth­ing more than a pet­ty fan­cy.

These thoughts came and went while I was gaz­ing at the screen.

Tarkovsky was togeth­er with me then. He was at the cor­ner of the stu­dio. When the film was over, he stood up, look­ing at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, “Very good. It makes me feel real fear.” Tarkovsky smiled shy­ly, but hap­pi­ly. And we toast­ed vod­ka at the restau­rant in the Film Insti­tute. Tarkovsky, who didn’t drink usu­al­ly, drank a lot of vod­ka, and went so far as to turn off the speak­er from which music had float­ed into the restau­rant, and began to sing the theme of samu­rai from Sev­en Samu­rai at the top of his voice.

As if to rival him, I joined in.

For I was at that moment very hap­py to find myself liv­ing on Earth.

Solaris makes a view­er feel this, and even this sin­gle fact shows us that Solaris is no ordi­nary SF film. It tru­ly some­how pro­vokes pure hor­ror in our soul. And it is under the total grip of the deep insights of Tarkovsky.

Kuro­sawa pays spe­cial atten­tion to the sequence, which you can watch above ana­lyzed by film schol­ars Vida John­son and Gra­ham Petrie, filmed in his own home­land: “What makes us shud­der is the shot of the loca­tion of Akasakamit­suke, Tokyo, Japan. By a skill­ful use of mir­rors, he turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, mul­ti­plied and ampli­fied, into a vin­tage image of the future city. Every shot of Solaris bears wit­ness to the almost daz­zling tal­ents inher­ent in Tarkovsky.”

Like all of Tarkovsky’s fea­tures, Solaris only holds up more firm­ly with time and thus still enjoys revival screen­ings all over the world, but you can also watch it free online right now. Just get ready, when you descend to Earth after­ward, to feel your own grat­i­tude at find­ing your­self back here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa to Ing­mar Bergman: “A Human Is Not Real­ly Capa­ble of Cre­at­ing Real­ly Good Works Until He Reach­es 80”

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Talk About Film­mak­ing (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Inter­view

Watch Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la in Japan­ese Whiskey Ads from 1979: The Inspi­ra­tion for Lost in Trans­la­tion

Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunt­ing Vision of the Future

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Break­down of the Director’s 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.

What Does Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” Look Like? An Accurate Illustration Created with 3D Modeling Software

in Architecture, Computer Science, Literature | October 27th, 2016

Sketchup ren­der­ings of the Library of Babel. Images cour­tesy of Jamie Zaw­in­s­ki.

Ful­fill­ing the max­im “write what you know,” Argen­tine fab­u­list Jorge Luis Borges penned one of his most extra­or­di­nary and bewil­der­ing sto­ries, “The Library of Babel,” while employed as an assis­tant librar­i­an. Borges, it has been noted—by Borges him­self in his 1970 New York­er essay “Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Notes”—found the work drea­ry and unful­fill­ing: “nine years of sol­id unhap­pi­ness,” as he put it plain­ly. “Some­times in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tram­line, my eyes would be filled with tears.”

And yet, for all of its tedi­um, his library posi­tion suit­ed his needs as a writer like none oth­er could. “I would do all my library work in the first hour,” he remem­bers, “and then steal away to the base­ment and pass the oth­er five hours in read­ing or writ­ing.” Dur­ing those stolen hours, Borges dreamed up a library the size of the uni­verse, “com­posed of an indef­i­nite and per­haps infi­nite num­ber of hexag­o­nal gal­leries, with vast air shafts between, sur­round­ed by very low rail­ings.” Like so many of the objects and places in Borges’ sto­ries, this fan­tas­tic struc­ture, Esch­er-like, is both vivid­ly described and impos­si­ble to imag­ine.

Many have tried their hand at visu­al­ly ren­der­ing the Library of Babel, but accord­ing to pro­gram­mer Jamie Zaw­in­s­ki, “past attempts,” writes Carey Dunne at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “aren’t faith­ful to the text,” omit­ting cru­cial struc­tures like the “sleep cham­ber, lava­to­ry, and hall­way” and screw­ing up “the place­ment of the spi­ral stair­way.” You can see Zawinski’s var­i­ous cri­tiques of these sup­posed fail­ures on his blog, JWZ. And you may won­der how it’s even pos­si­ble to con­struct an accu­rate mod­el of a struc­ture that may have no finite bound­aries and whose inter­nal archi­tec­ture the sto­ry itself calls into ques­tion. Nonethe­less, Zaw­in­s­ki has bold­ly giv­en it a try.

Using the 3D mod­el­ing pro­gram Sketchup, he has designed what he believes to be a mod­el supe­ri­or to the rest, though he admits “I don’t think this is quite right either.” If you’re won­der­ing “Why is he doing this?” Zaw­in­s­ki writes, “you and I have that in com­mon.” The Bor­ge­sian task, like that of the librar­i­an, is an end­less one, pur­sued with scholas­tic rig­or for its own sake rather than for some great reward. And once one enters the labyrinth of his twist­ing designs, there may be no way out but eter­nal­ly through. “The pos­si­bil­i­ty of a man’s find­ing his Vin­di­ca­tion,” writes Borges weari­ly of cer­tain librar­i­ans’ attempts to solve the library’s rid­dles, “or some treach­er­ous vari­a­tion there­of, can be com­put­ed as zero.”

So Zaw­in­s­ki trudges on. His “wrestling with the details of his ren­der­ing,” writes Dunne, “his obses­sive analy­sis of the word­ing of Borges’ descrip­tion, recalls the library inhab­i­tants’ futile quests to deci­pher the mys­ter­ies of the library.” The programmer’s admirable atten­tion to the physics of the space may at times sound like a rather lead­en way to approach what is essen­tial­ly an elab­o­rate metaphor: “I can’t help but think about the weight and pres­sure of a col­umn of air that high,” he mus­es in his ini­tial explo­rations, “and what is it sit­ting on, and how to route the plumb­ing from all of those toi­lets, and that toi­lets imply diges­tion, so where does the food come from?”

Such ques­tions take him far afield of Borges’ theo-philo­soph­i­cal para­ble: “Is there a sec­tion of the library devot­ed to farm­ing, and met­al­lur­gy?” Nonethe­less, Zawinski’s detailed analy­sis has pro­duced a visu­al­iza­tion of the space like none oth­er, and he admits to “over­think­ing a sub-infi­nite but near­ly bound­less hill of beans.” Borges’ imag­i­nary librar­i­an has aban­doned try­ing to solve the library’s mys­ter­ies. Hum­bled by the fail­ures of those who came before him, he per­sists in the “ele­gant hope” that the library “is unlim­it­ed and cycli­cal… repeat­ed in the same dis­or­der… which, thus repeat­ed, would be an order: the Order.” He wise­ly leaves the ulti­mate meta­phys­i­cal dis­cov­ery, how­ev­er, to “an eter­nal trav­el­er” with infi­nite time on their hands.

You can view Zawinski’s com­men­tary here, and see his designs here. On the bot­tom of this page, he lets you down­load his Sketchup file.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it The Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Sto­ries (Read 7 Free Online)

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

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Teaches You to Read Fiction Like a Writer

in Creativity, Education, Letters, Literature, Writing | October 24th, 2016

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

I wish I’d had a teacher who framed his or her assign­ments as let­ters…

Which is real­ly just anoth­er way of say­ing I wish I’d been lucky enough to have tak­en a class with writ­ers Kurt Von­negut or Lyn­da Bar­ry.

There’s still hope of a class with Bar­ry, aka Pro­fes­sor Chew­bac­ca, Pro­fes­sor Old Skull, and most recent­ly, Pro­fes­sor Dro­go. Those of us who can’t get a seat at the Wis­con­sin Insti­tute for Dis­cov­ery, the Omega Insti­tute, or the Clar­i­on Sci­ence Fic­tion and Fan­ta­sy Writ­ers’ Work­shop can play along at home, using assign­ments she gen­er­ous­ly makes avail­able in her books and on her Near-Sight­ed Mon­key Tum­blr.

Von­negut fans long for this lev­el of access, which is why we are dou­bly grate­ful to writer Suzanne McConnell, who took Vonnegut’s “Form of Fic­tion” (aka “Sur­face Crit­i­cism” aka “How to Talk out of the Cor­ner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro”) course at the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop in the mid-60s.

The goal was to exam­ine fic­tion from a writer’s per­spec­tive and McConnell (who is soon to pub­lish a book about Vonnegut’s advice to writ­ers) pre­served one of her old teacher’s term paper assign­ments—again in let­ter form. She lat­er had an epiphany that his assign­ments were “designed to teach some­thing much more than what­ev­er I thought then…  He was teach­ing us to do our own think­ing, to find out who we were, what we loved, abhorred, what set off our trip­wires, what tripped up our hearts.”

For the term paper, the eighty students—a group that includ­ed John Irv­ing, Gail God­win, and Andre Dubus II—were addressed as “Beloved” and charged with assign­ing a let­ter grade to each of the fif­teen sto­ries in Mas­ters of the Mod­ern Short Sto­ry (Har­court, Brace, 1955, W. Hav­ighurst, edi­tor).

(A decade and a half lat­er, Von­negut would sub­ject his own nov­els to the same treat­ment.)

A not­ed human­ist, Von­negut instruct­ed the class to read these sto­ries not in an over­ly ana­lyt­i­cal mind­set, but rather as if they had just con­sumed “two ounces of very good booze.”

The ensu­ing let­ter grades were meant to be “child­ish­ly self­ish and impu­dent mea­sures” of how much—or little—joy the sto­ries inspired in the read­er.

Next, stu­dents were instruct­ed to choose their three favorite and three least favorite sto­ries, then dis­guise them­selves as “minor but use­ful” lit mag edi­tors in order to advise their “wise, respect­ed, wit­ty and world-weary supe­ri­or” as to whether or not the select­ed sto­ries mer­it­ed pub­li­ca­tion.

Here’s the full assign­ment, which was pub­lished in Kurt Von­negut: Let­ters (Dela­corte Press, 2012). And also again in Slate.

Beloved:

This course began as Form and The­o­ry of Fic­tion, became Form of Fic­tion, then Form and Tex­ture of Fic­tion, then Sur­face Crit­i­cism, or How to Talk out of the Cor­ner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will prob­a­bly be Ani­mal Hus­bandry 108 by the time Black Feb­ru­ary rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cyn­i­cal and reli­gious. I want you to adore the Uni­verse, to be eas­i­ly delight­ed, but to be prompt as well with impa­tience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Uni­verse is or should be. “This above all …”

I invite you to read the fif­teen tales in Mas­ters of the Mod­ern Short Sto­ry (W. Hav­ighurst, edi­tor, 1955, Har­court, Brace, $14.95 in paper­back). Read them for plea­sure and sat­is­fac­tion, begin­ning each as though, only sev­en min­utes before, you had swal­lowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as lit­tle chil­dren …”

Then repro­duce on a sin­gle sheet of clean, white paper the table of con­tents of the book, omit­ting the page num­bers, and sub­sti­tut­ing for each num­ber a grade from A to F. The grades should be child­ish­ly self­ish and impu­dent mea­sures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some sto­ries bet­ter than oth­ers.

Pro­ceed next to the hal­lu­ci­na­tion that you are a minor but use­ful edi­tor on a good lit­er­ary mag­a­zine not con­nect­ed with a uni­ver­si­ty. Take three sto­ries that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pre­tend that they have been offered for pub­li­ca­tion. Write a report on each to be sub­mit­ted to a wise, respect­ed, wit­ty and world-weary supe­ri­or.

Do not do so as an aca­d­e­m­ic crit­ic, nor as a per­son drunk on art, nor as a bar­bar­ian in the lit­er­ary mar­ket place. Do so as a sen­si­tive per­son who has a few prac­ti­cal hunch­es about how sto­ries can suc­ceed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flat­ly, prag­mat­i­cal­ly, with cun­ning atten­tion to annoy­ing or grat­i­fy­ing details. Be your­self. Be unique. Be a good edi­tor. The Uni­verse needs more good edi­tors, God knows.

Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill some­body, about twen­ty pages from each of you should do neat­ly. Do not bub­ble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

poloniøus

McConnell sup­plied fur­ther details on the extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ence of being Vonnegut’s stu­dent in an essay for the Brook­lyn Rail:

 Kurt taught a Chekhov sto­ry. I can’t remem­ber the name of it. I didn’t quite under­stand the point, since noth­ing much hap­pened. An ado­les­cent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and anoth­er; she points at a lit­tle dog, as I recall, or maybe some­thing else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no con­flict, no dra­mat­ic turn­ing point or change. Kurt point­ed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juici­ness, and the promise of romance. Her inar­tic­u­late feel­ings spill into laugh­ter at some­thing innocu­ous. That’s what hap­pened in the sto­ry. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feel­ing her­self so alive was so encour­ag­ing of delight. Kurt’s enchant­ment taught me that such moments are noth­ing to sneeze at. They’re worth a sto­ry.             

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

In 1988, Kurt Von­negut Writes a Let­ter to Peo­ple Liv­ing in 2088, Giv­ing 7 Pieces of Advice

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Kurt Von­negut Urges Young Peo­ple to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature for Creating “New Poetic Expressions within the Great American Song Tradition”

in Literature, Music | October 13th, 2016

Image cour­tesy of The Nobel Prize’s Twit­ter stream.

His apoc­a­lyp­tic poet­ry plucks images and forms from the blues, the Bible, the Beats, Sym­bol­ists, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, and a bal­ladeer tra­di­tion dat­ing from medieval French and Eng­lish min­strel­sy to Appalachi­an set­tle­ment to Woody Guthrie, his first muse. His nar­ra­tive voice shifts from work to work as he has ful­ly embod­ied var­i­ous Amer­i­can char­ac­ters for over half a century—folk trou­ba­dour, rock and roll trick­ster, earnest coun­try croon­er, evan­ge­list, weary blues­man, star­ry-eyed jazz singer. “There is no sys­tem­at­ic way of ana­lyz­ing Dylan’s song lyrics or poems,” writes Julia Call­away at the Oxford Dic­tio­nar­ies blog; “they span more than five decades of his­tor­i­cal con­text and musi­cal style. But per­haps one of the most inter­est­ing sides of Dylan is how he uses lan­guage and his lyrics to project cer­tain iden­ti­ties, includ­ing folksinger and protest-musi­cian.”

Dylan began in that tra­di­tion with songs like “The Times They Are A‑Changin’” and “A Hard Rains A‑Gonna Fall”—pick­ing up Guthrie’s inflec­tions and man­ner­isms in bal­lads much more sophis­ti­cat­ed than they seemed at first lis­ten. “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” is a “sev­en minute epic,” writes Rolling Stone, “that warns against a com­ing apoc­a­lypse while cat­a­loging hor­rif­ic visions—gun-toting chil­dren, a tree drip­ping blood—with the wide-eyed fer­vor of John the Rev­e­la­tor.” The song “began life as a poem, which Dylan like­ly banged out on a type­writer owned by his bud­dy… Wavy Gravy.” Dylan has been ambiva­lent about whether or not we should call him a poet, but this is how so much of his work took shape—banged out on type­writ­ers in New York apartments—as poet­ry set to music. “Every line in [A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall] is actu­al­ly the start of a whole song,” said Dylan, “but when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”

After over five decades of lyrics packed with allu­sion and dense­ly woven themes and mean­ings, Dylan has had time to write those songs—several more apoc­a­lyp­tic epics set to a few chords on the acoustic gui­tar. “There are some nov­els, some trilo­gies, in fact, with less actu­al con­tent than Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watch­tow­er,’” says the Nerd­writer in the analy­sis of that cryp­tic John Wes­ley Hard­ing song above. One could say the same about cer­tain songs that appear on near­ly every Dylan record, like the 11-minute “Des­o­la­tion Row,” below. Amid only a few mis­steps, Dylan has released album after album, decade after decade, that show­case his unpar­al­leled word­craft in var­i­ous song forms. And some of his finest work has appeared only in recent years, when it seems his career might have come to a close. Despite some mixed reac­tions—and some con­cern for Philip Roth—most peo­ple have respond­ed to news this morn­ing of his win for the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture with a decid­ed, “yes, of course.”

Dylan’s recog­ni­tion by the Nobel Com­mit­tee val­i­dates not only the song­writer him­self, but the form he embraced and shaped. As per­ma­nent sec­re­tary of the Swedish Acad­e­my Sara Danius remarked in her announce­ment, Dylan “cre­at­ed new poet­ic expres­sions with­in the Amer­i­can song tra­di­tion.”  The award rep­re­sents “a recog­ni­tion of the whole tra­di­tion that Bob Dylan rep­re­sents,” says crit­ic David Had­ju, “so it’s part­ly a retroac­tive award for Robert John­son and Hank Williams and Smokey Robin­son and the Bea­t­les. It should have been tak­en seri­ous­ly as an art form a long time ago.” One could argue that Amer­i­can song has already been tak­en as seri­ous­ly as any art form, but that it isn’t lit­er­a­ture.

Sev­er­al peo­ple have done so. As New York Times writer Hiroko Tabuchi put it, “this might be a dis­ap­point­ing day for book­sellers and pub­lish­ers.” Hard­ly. Not only does Dylan have a mem­oir out, Chron­i­cles: Vol­ume One, the first of a planned tril­o­gy, but we may also find renewed appre­ci­a­tion for his first book, 1966’s Taran­tu­la. Dylan’s songs and draw­ings have been turned into pic­ture books, pub­lished in col­lec­tions, and pored over in biog­ra­phy after biog­ra­phy, com­men­tary after com­men­tary. And next month, Dylan him­self will release The Lyrics: Since 1962, a com­pre­hen­sive, defin­i­tive col­lec­tion of the song­writer’s lyrics, com­plete with expert anno­ta­tions. You can pre-order a copy here.

The lit­er­ary out­put by and about Dylan should keep book­sellers busy for many months after this announce­ment. But Dylan’s is pri­mar­i­ly a liv­ing, bardic tra­di­tion, lest we for­get that all lit­er­a­ture began as song. So con­grat­u­la­tions to Dylan and for per­haps long-over­due recog­ni­tion of Amer­i­can songcraft as a gen­uine­ly lit­er­ary art form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Young Bob Dylan, Before Releas­ing His First Album, Tell Amaz­ing Tales About Grow­ing Up in a Car­ni­val

Hear Bob Dylan’s Unedit­ed & Bewil­der­ing Inter­view With Nat Hentoff for Play­boy Mag­a­zine (1965)

The Reli­gions of Bob Dylan: From Deliv­er­ing Evan­gel­i­cal Ser­mons to Singing Hava Nag­i­la With Har­ry Dean Stan­ton

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

A Master List of 800 Free Classic eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

in Books, Education, Literature | October 5th, 2016

Maybe you’re an eBooks hold­out, a late adopter, a dis­dain­er of the book as a brand­ed “device”? I get it. Is there any­thing more ridicu­lous than putting down a book because its bat­ter­ies have run out? No amount of crow­ing about the suprema­cy of tech will make me love the smell and feel of paper less…

And yet…

With­in the charm­ing heft of print­ed books reside their lim­i­ta­tion. Trav­el­ing stu­dents, researchers, or avid read­ers must lug sev­er­al pounds of bound paper along with them on long jour­neys, or to work ses­sions at the local cof­fee shop. An eRead­er or smart­phone can hold an entire library—which one can expand ad infini­tum, it seems, on the fly.

This feature—along with the ease of copy­ing quotes and pas­sages and send­ing them across platforms—eventually sold me on the eBook as a robust sup­ple­ment to print. And if it sounds like I’m mak­ing a sales pitch, I am: for hun­dreds of free books, avail­able to read on the device of your choos­ing. Entry-lev­el Kin­dle, bud­get smart­phone, or lat­est, fan­ci­est iPad—most all will accom­mo­date the range of for­mats avail­able in our col­lec­tion of 800 Free eBooks.

Can you freely down­load the lat­est New York Times best­sellers? Not here, and I’d hope—for the sake of those hard-work­ing writers—that you’d pay to read new releas­es. Can you car­ry along with you on your next busi­ness trip or vaca­tion the works of Aris­to­tle and Freud, sev­er­al nov­els by Jane Austen and Joseph Con­rad, the mas­ter­works of Hegel, Hume, and Kant, the com­plete Shake­speare, and Proust’s mul­ti-vol­ume À la recherche du temps per­du? Quite eas­i­ly. Here’s a small sam­ple of what’s on our list:

• Austen, Jane - Pride & Prej­u­dice
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Car­roll, Lewis - Through the Look­ing-Glass
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Con­rad, Joseph - Heart of Dark­ness
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Orig­i­nal Mag­a­zine Ver­sion
• Dos­to­evsky, Fyo­dor - Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Eliot, George - Mid­dle­march
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Fitzger­ald, F. Scott - Tales of the Jazz Age
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Freud, Sig­mund - Dream Psy­chol­o­gy: Psy­cho­analy­sis for Begin­ners
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Tol­stoy, Leo - Anna Karen­i­na
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• Whit­man, Walt - Leaves of Grass
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now
• Woll­stonecraft, Mary — A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Women
  • iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online Now

See the full list of 800 offer­ings here. They may lack the sen­so­ry plea­sure of print, but the abil­i­ty to car­ry an entire library of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture in your pock­et has its advan­tages, to say the least. And if your trav­els include long dri­ves, you’ll also want to check out our mas­ter list of Free Audio Books.

Note: If you need help upload­ing .mobi files to your Kin­dle, you might find it use­ful to watch this video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Audio Books: Fic­tion & Lit­er­a­ture 

A Mas­ter List of 1,200 Free Cours­es From Top Uni­ver­si­ties: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lec­tures

Book Read­ers Live Longer Lives, Accord­ing to New Study from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

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

A Complete List of the 533 Movies & TV Shows Watched on the International Space Station

in Film, Television | September 30th, 2016

Image cour­tesy of NASA

To keep some mea­sure of san­i­ty, the astro­nauts liv­ing aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS), some 220 miles above our plan­et Earth, make a point of unwind­ing. Accord­ing to NASA, the astro­nauts get week­ends off. And, “on any giv­en day, crew mem­bers can watch movies, play music, read books, play cards and talk to their fam­i­lies.” Ear­li­er this year, Pale­o­Fu­ture gave us a fur­ther glimpse into what astro­naut down­time looks like, when its edi­tor, Matt Novak, print­ed a Com­plete List of Movies and TV Shows On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. Acquired through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion request, the list is a cat­a­logue of every film and TV show in the ISS media library. As Matt notes, there are many clas­sics (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by North­west), “plen­ty of space-themed and dystopi­an sci-fi movies” (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Run­ner), and a help­ful serv­ing of com­e­dy (Air­plane). Below, you can find the first 100 items on the list. Get the com­plete list–all 533 movies and TV shows–at Pale­o­fu­ture.

1. 1941
2. 12 Mon­keys
3. 12 Years a Slave
4. 2 Fast 2 Furi­ous
5. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
7. 21 Jump Street
8. 24 (Sea­sons 1–8)
9. 48 Hours
10. 8 Mile
11. A Christ­mas Car­ol
12. A Christ­mas Sto­ry
13. A Knights Tale
14. A Man and a Woman
15. A Night at the Opera
16. A Night at the Rox­bury
17. A Per­fect Mur­der
18. A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion
19. A Room with a View
20. Absolute­ly Fab­u­lous (Series 1–3)
21. Air Force One
22. Air­plane
23. Alias Sea­son 1
24. Alien
25. Alien 3
26. Alien Res­ur­rec­tion
27. Aliens
28. All Good Things
29. Along Came Pol­ly
30. Always
31. Amer­i­can Gang­ster
32. Amer­i­can Sniper
33. Amer­i­can Wed­ding
34. An Amer­i­can in Paris
35. An Arti­cle of Hope
36. Ana­lyze This
37. Anchor­man
38. Anchor­man 2
39. Ani­mal House (1978)
40. Argo
41. Armaged­don
42. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
43. Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
44. Arrow Sea­son 1
45. Arsenic and Old Lace
46. As Good as it Gets
47. Austin Pow­ers Inter­na­tion­al Man of Mys­tery
48. Austin Pow­ers The Spy Who Shagged Me
49. Aus­tralia
50. Avatar
51. Baby Mama
52. Back to Bataan
53. Back to the Future
54. Back to the Future Part II
55. Back to the Future Part III
56. Back­draft
57. Band of Broth­ers Sea­son 1
58. Bataan
59. Bat­man For­ev­er
60. Bat­man Returns
61. Bat­tle for the Plan­et of the Apes
62. Bat­tle of Britain
63. Bat­tle­ship
64. Beneath the Plan­et of the Apes
65. Ben-Hur
66. Bet­ter Call Saul Sea­son 1
67. Bev­er­ly Hills Cop II
68. Bev­er­ly Hills Cop III
69. Big Bang The­o­ry (Sea­sons 1–8)
70. Big Eyes
71. Big Jake
72. Bil­ly Jack
73. Bird­man, or the Unex­pect­ed Virtue of Igno­rance
74. Black Hawk Down
75. Black Mask
76. Black Swan
77. Blade Run­ner
78. Blaz­ing Sad­dles Blend­ed
79. Blue Plan­et Frozen Seas
80. Blue Plan­et Ocean World
81. Blues Broth­ers
82. Bob Newhart But­ton-Down Con­cert
83. Body of Lies
84. Brave­heart
85. Break­ing Bad Sea­sons 1–6
86. Brides­maids
87. Bull Durham
88. Cad­dyshack
89. Cahill Unit­ed States Mar­shal
90. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The First Avenger
91. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The Win­ter Sol­dier Cap­tain Phillips
92. Casablan­ca
93. Cast Away
94. Catch-22
95. Celtic Woman Songs from the Heart
96. Chance Are
97. Char­i­ots of Fire
98. Char­lie St Cloud
99. Chil­dren of Men
100. Chisum

Find the com­plete list of 533 films and TV shows here.

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:

Astro­naut Chris Had­field Sings David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Going to the Bath­room in Space But Were Afraid to Ask

If Astro­nauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

William Shat­ner Puts in a Long Dis­tance Call to Astro­naut Aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion