Julia Child Shows David Letterman How to Cook Meat with a Blow Torch

in Comedy, Television | August 15th, 2012

Julia Child would have turned 100 years old today. As an author and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty, Child intro­duced French cui­sine to the main­stream Amer­i­can pub­lic and turned cook­ing into a dai­ly adven­ture.

Child became fas­ci­nat­ed with French food after mov­ing to Paris in 1948. She stud­ied cook­ing at the renowned Cor­don Bleu school, and in 1961 co-authored the two-vol­ume Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing. More than 2 mil­lion copies of the book have been sold, but Child is best known for her tele­vi­sion appear­ances on a suc­ces­sion of pro­grams, start­ing with The French Chef in 1962 and end­ing with Juli­a’s Casu­al Din­ners in 1999, just three years before her death in 2002 at the age of 92.

In 2009 she was the sub­ject of the film Julie & Julia, star­ring Meryl Streep. The movie is based on the real-life adven­tures of Julie Pow­ell, who was great­ly inspired by Child. “Some­thing came out of Julia on tele­vi­sion that was unex­pect­ed,” says Pow­ell in a video at Biography.com. “She’s not a beau­ti­ful woman, but her voice and her atti­tude and her playfulness–it’s just mag­i­cal. You can’t fake that. You can’t take class­es to learn how to be won­der­ful. She just want­ed to enter­tain and edu­cate peo­ple at the same time. Our food cul­ture is bet­ter for it.”

For a quick reminder of Child’s voice, atti­tude and playfulness–not to men­tion her con­sid­er­able skill with a blowtorch–we bring you her mem­o­rable late-1980s appear­ance on Late Night with David Let­ter­man, in which the resource­ful Child adjusts to time con­straints by chang­ing a sim­ple Amer­i­can ham­burg­er into beef tartare grat­iné.

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!

Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

in Film, Literature, Poetry | August 15th, 2012

Neglect­ed to mark the occa­sion of poet and nov­el­ist Charles Bukows­ki’s birth­day yes­ter­day? Then observe it today with a view­ing of the doc­u­men­tary Bukows­ki: Born Into This (avail­able for pur­chase here). The most in-depth explo­ration of Bukowski’s life yet com­mit­ted to film, the movie “is valu­able because it pro­vides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems like­ly to last, if not for­ev­er, then longer than many of his con­tem­po­raries. He out­sells Ker­ouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with say­ing, out­sell any oth­er mod­ern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukows­ki enthu­si­asts both expect­ed and unex­pect­ed appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Har­ry Dean Stan­ton, Black Spar­row Press pub­lish­er John Mar­tin, film­mak­er Tay­lor Hack­ford (direc­tor of the ear­li­er doc­u­men­tary titled sim­ply Bukows­ki), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skill­ful­ly woven with the rem­i­nis­cences of for­mer drink­ing bud­dies, fel­low writ­ers and Bukowski’s sec­ond wife, Lin­da, the keep­er of the flame, whom he mar­ried in 1985,” wrote Stephen Hold­en in the New York Times. “With­out strain­ing, the film makes a strong case for Bukows­ki as a major Amer­i­can poet whose work was a slash­ing rebuke to polite aca­d­e­m­ic for­mal­ism.”

Some might con­trar­i­ly con­sid­er Bukowski’s writ­ing glo­ri­fied wal­low­ing, a mere pro­fane exul­ta­tion of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omit­ting nei­ther great embar­rass­ment nor minor tri­umph. Hold­en men­tions that Bukows­ki, “a pari­ah in high school, suf­fered from severe acne vul­garis, which cov­ered his face with run­ning sores that left his skin deeply pit­ted. He recalls stand­ing mis­er­ably in the dark out­side his senior prom, too humil­i­at­ed to show him­self,” and that for all his work deal­ing with late-life sex­u­al prowess, “he was a vir­gin until he was 24, the same age at which his first sto­ry was pub­lished. His descrip­tion of sex­u­al ini­ti­a­tion with an obese woman whom he wrong­ly accused of steal­ing his wal­let is a spec­tac­u­lar­ly unpromis­ing begin­ning to the pro­lif­ic sex­u­al activ­i­ty (described in his nov­el “Women”) that flow­ered after fame brought admir­ers.” Ebert asks the obvi­ous ques­tion: “How much was leg­end, how much was pose, how much was real?”  Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the doc­u­men­tary sug­gests as much. There were no shields sep­a­rat­ing the real Bukows­ki, the pub­lic Bukows­ki and the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so imme­di­ate and affect­ing: The wound­ed man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukows­ki, “Lau­re­ate of Amer­i­can Lowlife”

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

What Would It Be Like to Fly Through the Universe?

in Astronomy, Video - Science | August 15th, 2012

Of course, the ques­tion has crossed your mind, at least once: What would it be like to fly through the uni­verse? Now you can find out.

Accord­ing to NASA’s Astron­o­my Pic­ture of the Day web­site, the clip above offers per­haps the best sim­u­la­tion yet. The ani­mat­ed flight takes you through 400,000 galax­ies (each spot rep­re­sents one galaxy) and brings you to a point 1.3 bil­lion light years from Earth. And that’s just a small slice of the larg­er uni­verse. Miguel Aragon-Cal­vo and Alex Sza­lay (both of Johns Hop­kins) pro­duced the video along with Mark Sub­barao of the Adler Plan­e­tar­i­um using images from the Sloan Dig­i­tal Sky Sur­vey.

On a relat­ed note, don’t miss What the f#ck has NASA done to make your life awe­some?. It will remind you what NASA’s doing with tax­pay­er fund­ing.

Plus we have great Astron­o­my cours­es in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Online Cours­es.

via Metafil­ter

Let us deliv­er intel­li­gent media to you. Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus.

Famous Actors & Actresses Answer Revealing Questions on Inside the Actors Studio: A Compilation

in Television | August 14th, 2012

Overt­ly or covert­ly, inter­view pro­grams all have tra­di­tions. James Lip­ton, host of Inside the Actors Stu­dio for the past eigh­teen years, has cham­pi­oned per­haps the most overt inter­view-pro­gram tra­di­tion of all: the Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire. Orig­i­nal­ly wield­ed by anoth­er host, Bernard Piv­ot of the French lit­er­ary talk show Apos­tro­phes, the renowned Ques­tion­naire demands of the inter­vie­wee ten sim­ple pieces of infor­ma­tion: their favorite word, their turn-on, their turn-off, the sound they love, the sound they hate, their favorite curse word, the pro­fes­sion oth­er than their own they would like to attempt, the pro­fes­sion they would­n’t like to attempt, and what they’d like to hear God say when they arrive at the pearly gates. You can watch com­pi­la­tions of Lip­ton’s Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire seg­ments on YouTube, includ­ing the one above with Hugh Lau­rie, Ralph Feinnes, and Rus­sell Crowe. Their turn-ons, respec­tive­ly: eye con­tact, Shake­speare, a well-con­struct­ed sen­tence. Their turn-offs: finan­cial advice, envi­ron­men­tal des­e­cra­tion, false accu­sa­tion.

Or have a look at this one, which bears sim­i­lar­ly pithy insights into the inner lives of Daniel Rad­cliffe, Angeli­na Jolie, and Will Smith. Rad­cliffe would like to try his hand at jour­nal­ism; Jolie, explo­ration; Smith, sci­ence. Though Lip­ton cred­its the Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire to Piv­ot on air every time, its ori­gins lay fur­ther back in time. Piv­ot devel­oped his ques­tion­naire in response to Mar­cel Proust’s, a list of prompts meant to reveal the recip­i­en­t’s per­son­al­i­ty, includ­ing “Your favorite qual­i­ties in a woman,” “Your favorite qual­i­ties in a man,” “Your idea of hap­pi­ness,” and “Your idea of mis­ery” — per­son­al­i­ty-reveal­ing ques­tion­naires being very much the rage in fin de siè­cle Europe. While the tra­di­tion thrives to this day in Lip­ton’s for­mal­ly strict prac­tice, part of me would enjoy the reac­tions to see him re-intro­duce a Prous­t­ian prompt like “The mil­i­tary event I admire the most.”

Four Inside the Actors Stu­dio Piv­ot Ques­tion­naire com­pi­la­tions on YouTube: Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., John­ny Depp; Robin Williams and Antho­ny Hop­kins; Hugh Lau­rie, Ralph Feinnes, Rus­sell Crowe; Daniel Rad­cliffe, Ange­line Jolie, Will Smith

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan’s Moral Heroine) Instructs Johnny Carson on the Virtue of Selfishness, 1967

in Philosophy, Politics, Television | August 14th, 2012

Since Wis­con­sin Sen­a­tor Paul Ryan may soon be only a heart­beat away from the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, it might be good to pause for a moment and con­sid­er the man’s val­ues. In par­tic­u­lar, it might make sense to get acquaint­ed with his stat­ed source of moral inspi­ra­tion.

“The rea­son I got involved in pub­lic ser­vice,” Ryan said in 2005, “by and large, if I had to cred­it one thinker, one per­son, it would be Ayn Rand.”

The Russ­ian émi­gré writer and philoso­pher Ayn Rand believed that self-inter­est was the great­est good and that altru­ism was unspeak­ably wicked. “Altru­ism is a mon­strous notion,” she said in 1981. “It is the moral­i­ty of can­ni­bals devour­ing one anoth­er. It is a the­o­ry of pro­found hatred for man, for rea­son, for achieve­ment, for any form of human suc­cess and hap­pi­ness on earth.”

Ryan was deeply impressed when he first read Rand’s books as a young­ster. “I grew up read­ing Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my val­ue sys­tems are,” Rand told The Atlas Soci­ety in 2005. “It inspired me so much that it’s required read­ing in my office for all interns and my staff.”

Rand called the Unit­ed States a “nation of mon­ey,” and she meant it as a com­pli­ment. “The words ‘to make mon­ey’ hold the essence of human moral­i­ty,” she wrote in a famous pas­sage in her 1957 nov­el, Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s hier­ar­chy of virtue the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al­ist is “the high­est type of human being” and the needy are rab­ble. “Par­a­sites, moochers, loot­ers, brutes and thugs can be of no val­ue to a human being,” Rand wrote in 1963. “Nor can he gain any ben­e­fit from liv­ing in a soci­ety geared to their needs, demands and pro­tec­tion, a soci­ety that treats him as a sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mal and penal­izes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a soci­ety based on the ethics of altru­ism.”

If Rand taught Ryan “quite a bit” about who he is and what his val­ue sys­tems are, then per­haps Rand’s state­ment above should tell us some­thing about Ryan’s cur­rent bud­get pro­pos­al, which would slash $3.3 tril­lion from pro­grams for low-income earn­ers over the next decade while pro­vid­ing a wind­fall for the wealthy in the form of tax cuts that would net an aver­age $265,000 a year for those with incomes greater than $1 million–over and above the $129,000 they would already receive from Ryan’s exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts. In Ryan’s bud­get the rich are released from their unjust bur­den as “sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mals” while the “par­a­sites,” “moochers” and “looters”–i.e. the elder­ly, the dis­abled and the poor–are taught a les­son in virtue.

For a quick primer on Rand’s philosophy–straight from the horse’s mouth–watch her 1967 appear­ance (above) on The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Col­bert on Ayn Rand

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? A Creative Use of Google Street View

in Google, Technology | August 14th, 2012

You know the archi­tec­ture of Paris when you see it. But what makes Parisian archi­tec­ture dis­tinc­tive? What visu­al ele­ments come togeth­er to pro­duce a par­tic­u­lar urban land­scape? Five schol­ars from Carnegie Mel­lon and the École nor­male supérieure are try­ing to give pre­cise answers to those ques­tions. And they’re tak­ing a nov­el approach. They’re run­ning a large repos­i­to­ry of geo­t­agged imagery from Google Street View through a pro­pri­etary algo­rithm and then iden­ti­fy­ing the dis­tinc­tive archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments for each locale — the street signs, win­dows, bal­conies that make a city unique. Their exper­i­ment (all summed up in a short abstract here) cov­ers Paris, Lon­don, Prague, Barcelona, Milan, New York, Boston, Philadel­phia, San Fran­cis­co, San Paulo, Mex­i­co City, and Tokyo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paint­ings & Muse­ums to You

Google Street View Opens Up a Look at Shackleton’s Antarc­tic

Tour the Ama­zon with Google Street View; No Pass­port Need­ed

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Surrealist First Film (1934)

in Film | August 13th, 2012

The sto­ry is leg­endary. When Orson Welles shot Cit­i­zen Kane (1941), he was a first-time film­mak­er who cre­at­ed what Roger Ebert has called “one of the mir­a­cles of cin­e­ma.” And, years lat­er, Welles admit­ted that per­haps youth­ful igno­rance, being a com­plete novice, was the genius of the film.

I didn’t know what you couldn’t do. I didn’t delib­er­ate­ly set out to invent any­thing. It just seemed to me, why not? And there is a great gift that igno­rance has to bring to any­thing. That was the gift I brought to Kane, igno­rance. [See him elab­o­rate on that here.]

If you want to get tech­ni­cal about things, Kane was­n’t Orson Welles’ first film. Back in the sum­mer of 1934, Welles, only 19 years old, joined up with William Vance, a high school friend, and shot The Hearts of Age. It ran eight short min­utes and fea­tured four cast mem­bers: Welles, Vance, Vir­ginia Nichol­son (Welles’ girl­friend and even­tu­al first wife) and Paul Edger­ton. Mean­while, the plot was sur­re­al, cryp­tic, hard to fol­low — all for a good rea­son. In an inter­view with Peter Bog­danovich, Welles claimed that The Hearts of Age was noth­ing but a par­o­dy of Jean Cocteau’s first film, The Blood of a Poet (1930). It was also a “joke,” a film “shot in two hours, for fun, one Sun­day after­noon. It has no sort of mean­ing.” Sens­es of Cin­e­ma has more on Welles’ first for­ay (or non-for­ay) into film­mak­ing. You can find it per­ma­nent­ly list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online, along with oth­er movies cre­at­ed by or star­ring the great Orson Welles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles Nar­rates Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry, Kafka’s Para­ble, and Free­dom Riv­er

Orson Welles’ The Stranger: The Full Movie

Al Jazeera Travel Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food

in Television, Travel | August 13th, 2012

The Japan­ese have a word for it: kuidaore, “to eat one­self bank­rupt.” This has risen to some com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tion and aspi­ra­tion in Osa­ka, Japan’s sec­ond-largest city, a for­mer mer­chant enclave once referred to as the coun­try’s “kitchen.” You can see exact­ly what emp­ties Osakan bank accounts on Al Jazeera Eng­lish’s series Street Food. Its episode on the city (part one, part two), embed­ded above, seeks out the stands that most effi­cient­ly cater to the cit­i­zen­ry’s char­ac­ter­is­tic busy­ness, the source of the fresh­est sushi around, the bar­be­cue coun­ters of Kore­atown, the poi­so­nous­ly-liv­ered fugu fish, the ide­al­ly con­tro­ver­sial dish that is whale meat, and a range of food writ­ers and crit­ics to lay down some culi­nary insight. The pro­gram fin­ish­es its jour­ney with one vis­it to a culi­nary acad­e­my and anoth­er to the poor­er side of this Japan­ese metrop­o­lis. Being a Japa­neese metrop­o­lis with more pover­ty than most but also one a greater love of eat­ing than most, Osa­ka has pro­duced street food even among its street peo­ple.

There you have the basic form of a Street Food broad­cast, each of which takes on a dif­fer­ent world city, all of which oper­ate under the the­o­ry that the best path into a cul­ture runs through its alleys most dense with comestible com­merce. In the episode just above (part one, part two), Mon­tre­al’s meet­ing of Eng­lish and French sen­si­bil­i­ties, a slight­ly uneasy coex­is­tence in the best of times, turns into an all-out ide­o­log­i­cal con­flict on the sub­ject of how to eat. One par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant skir­mish occurs over pou­tine, the French fry, cheese curd, and gravy dish essen­tial to any inves­ti­ga­tion of Mon­tre­al cui­sine. In the episode below (part one, part two), we see the ele­ments of Span­ish and Andean eat­ing final­ly con­verg­ing on the streets of Lima — aid­ed, in a big way, by fla­vors brought in by the Peru’s many immi­grants from Asian. Admit­ted­ly, the con­ver­gence isn’t com­plete, not will it be until Limeños not of native descent come to enjoy the city’s most pop­u­lar item of street food, with 65 mil­lion eat­en every year: the guinea pig.

All episodes of Al Jazeera Eng­lish’s Street Food on YouTube:

• Bei­jing (part one, part two)
• Cairo (part one, part two)
• Fez (part one, part two)
• Jerusalem (part one, part two)
• Kingston (part one, part two)
• Lima (part one, part two)
• Lon­don (part one, part two)
• Mon­tre­al (part one, part two)
• Nairo­bi (part one, part two)
• New York (part one, part two)
• Osa­ka (part one, part two)
• Paler­mo (part one, part two)
• Zanz­ibar (part one, part two)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

George Carlin Performs His “Seven Dirty Words” Routine: Historic and Completely NSFW

in Comedy, Literature | August 13th, 2012

Okay, this is George Carlin’s infa­mous bit “Sev­en Words You Can Nev­er Say on Tele­vi­sion,” so please don’t watch it at work. That said, a bit of con­text: Car­lin, arch com­ic satirist and inci­sive social crit­ic, orig­i­nal­ly per­formed this rou­tine in Mil­wau­kee in 1972. Car­lin is delib­er­ate­ly push­ing the enve­lope here, and he’s pay­ing homage to the great Lenny Bruce, who was per­se­cut­ed by cen­sors and police, and hound­ed out of work, more or less, for doing what Car­lin does above—poking fun at our Amer­i­can squea­mish­ness about the body, sex­u­al­i­ty, and reli­gion. With Eliz­a­bethan glee, Car­lin takes sev­en words from Bruce’s orig­i­nal nine and reduces them to absur­di­ties. As we all know–South Park and pay cable excepted–most of these words are still taboo and can send cer­tain view­ers, media watch­dogs, and con­gress peo­ple into fits.

Carlin’s point is exact­ly that—people squirm when they hear obscene words, as though the lan­guage itself had some mag­i­cal­ly destruc­tive pow­er, but as he says, “there are no bad words. Bad thoughts, Bad inten­tions,” sug­gest­ing that the prob­lem lies in the minds and hearts of those who assume that quar­an­ti­ning cer­tain uses of lan­guage will keep us from cer­tain ideas and acts they fear—or in his own irrev­er­ent voice, that some words “will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the coun­try from win­ning the war.…” Car­lin was arrest­ed after his Mil­wau­kee appear­ance when an audi­ence mem­ber com­plained, but a Wis­con­sin judge deter­mined that his speech was pro­tect­ed. Lat­er, when the bit was broad­cast by a New York radio sta­tion, legal trou­ble ensued once again, and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1978 that the gov­ern­ment had the right to restrict tele­vi­sion and radio broad­casts in case chil­dren were lis­ten­ing. Car­lin, who died in 2008 at the age of 71, said of the case, “My name is a foot­note in Amer­i­can legal his­to­ry, which I’m per­verse­ly kind of proud of.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Great George Car­lin Showed Louis CK the Way to Suc­cess (NSFW)

George Car­lin: The Mod­ern Man in Three Min­utes

Con­for­mi­ty Isn’t a Recipe for Excel­lence: Wis­dom from George Car­lin & Steve Jobs (NSFW)

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

David Rakoff Reads Personal Story During Live Stage Performance of This American Life (May, 2012)

in Books, Comedy, Life | August 11th, 2012

By now, you know that David Rakoff, a prizewin­ning humorist cham­pi­oned by David Sedaris, died Thurs­day night after two pub­lic bat­tles with can­cer. Rakoff cul­ti­vat­ed a fol­low­ing among lis­ten­ers of This Amer­i­can Life, the beloved radio show host­ed by Ira Glass. In May, he made one of his last appear­ances on the show when TAL pre­sent­ed “The Invis­i­ble Made Vis­i­ble,” a live stage per­for­mance beamed to movie the­aters nation­wide. Here, Rakoff reads the sto­ry, “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feath­er,” about “the invis­i­ble process­es that can hap­pen inside our bodies…and the vis­i­ble effects they even­tu­al­ly have.” You won’t want to his miss his poignant last dance. It’s yet anoth­er reminder of why he’ll be sore­ly missed. We’d also rec­om­mend spend­ing time with his appear­ances on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ira Glass on the Art of Sto­ry­telling

David Sedaris and Ian Fal­con­er Intro­duce “Squir­rel Seeks Chip­munk”