Acclaimed BBC Production of Hamlet, Starring David Tennant (Doctor Who) and Patrick Stewart (Star Trek)

in Film, Theatre | April 23rd, 2012

In 2008 the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny drew rave reviews for its pro­duc­tion of William Shake­speare’s Ham­let, which fea­tured the Scot­tish actor David Ten­nant, star of the hit BBC sci­ence fic­tion show Doc­tor Who, as the trag­i­cal­ly inde­ci­sive Prince of Den­mark.

“Gre­go­ry Doran’s pro­duc­tion is one of the most rich­ly tex­tured, best-act­ed ver­sions of the play we have seen in years,” wrote Michael Billing­ton in The Guardian. “And Ten­nant, as any­one famil­iar with his ear­li­er work with the RSC would expect, has no dif­fi­cul­ty in mak­ing the tran­si­tion from the BBC’s Time Lord to a man who could be bound­ed in a nut­shell and count him­self a king of infi­nite space. He is a fine Ham­let whose virtues, and occa­sion­al vices, are insep­a­ra­ble from the pro­duc­tion itself.”

The cast includ­ed Mari­ah Gale as Ophe­lia, Peter de Jer­sey as Hor­a­tio, Oliv­er Ford Davies as Polo­nius, Pen­ny Down­ie as Gertrude, and Patrick Stew­art of Star Trek fame in what Charles Spencer of The Tele­graph called “the strongest, scari­est per­for­mance as Claudius I have seen. A mod­ern tyrant in a sur­veil­lance state full of spies, inform­ers and two-way mir­rors in Doran’s thriller-like pro­duc­tion, he presents a façade of smil­ing, bespec­ta­cled genial­i­ty.” Stew­art also played the Ghost of Ham­let’s father.

“This is a Ham­let of quick­sil­ver intel­li­gence, mimet­ic vigour and wild humour,” wrote Billing­ton: “one of the fun­ni­est I’ve ever seen.” Accord­ing to Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Stan­dard, Ten­nant brought new insights into his char­ac­ter’s unpre­dictable behav­ior: “His humor­ous Ham­let emerges as an undi­ag­nosed man­ic depres­sive, whose mood swings ren­der him tem­pera­men­tal­ly inca­pable of ful­fill­ing a revenge sce­nario.”

For those of us unable to see the stage pro­duc­tion, we’re for­tu­nate that Doran held the orig­i­nal cast togeth­er long enough to make a film ver­sion, first broad­cast on BBC Two in 2009. You can watch the com­plete three-hour movie online over at PBS. A scene where Ten­nant per­forms Ham­let’s Solil­o­quy can be viewed above. And for more of Ham­let and Shake­speare, you can access text and audio ver­sions of the great writer’s com­plete works in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions.

The BBC pro­duc­tion of Ham­let has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Bruce Springsteen Exhibition Held in Philadelphia; It’s Now Official, The Boss is an American Icon

in Music | April 23rd, 2012

It’s offi­cial. Bruce Spring­steen has gone from musi­cian to Amer­i­can icon, join­ing the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Want some proof of his tran­scen­dence? Just look to Philadel­phia where The Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter is hold­ing the first major exhi­bi­tion about the Amer­i­can song­writer. From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Spring­steen takes a com­pre­hen­sive look at Spring­steen’s body of musi­cal work with the help of 15o arti­facts. Ask why a Spring­steen exhib­it deserves to be held in The Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter, and its CEO/President David Eis­ner will tell you that the “Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter is about the val­ues [e.g. free­dom & equal­i­ty] and dreams on which Amer­i­ca was based, and Spring­steen’s music is all about achiev­ing the Amer­i­can Dream.” What’s more, Spring­steen’s music touch­es on deeply Amer­i­can polit­i­cal issues, includ­ing the First Amend­ment.

The exhi­bi­tion runs through Sep­tem­ber 3rd (tick­ets avail­able here), and every Fri­day the Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter plans to pub­lish on its blog arti­cles inspired by Bruce Spring­steen and the First Amend­ment.

McLuhan Said “The Medium Is The Message”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

in Media, Radio | April 23rd, 2012

For my mon­ey, “I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with every­thing I say” tops the list of Mar­shall McLuhan-isms, fol­lowed close­ly and at times sur­passed by “You don’t like those ideas? I got oth­ers.” Many pre­fer the immor­tal “You know noth­ing of my work!”, the line McLuhan deliv­ers dur­ing his brief appear­ance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. In 1977, the same year Allen’s pro­tag­o­nist would sum­mon him to defeat that pon­tif­i­cat­ing aca­d­e­m­ic, McLuhan flew to Syd­ney to deliv­er a lec­ture. Then, for the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion’s Radio Nation­al, he record­ed a pro­gram answer­ing ques­tions from stu­dents, nuns, and oth­ers about his views on media. (Find Part 1 above, and Parts 2 and 3 here and here.) McLuhan hap­pened to view media in a way nobody else did at the time, and the fields of media stud­ies and media the­o­ry would go on to devel­op in large part from his work. This Joyce-lov­ing, God-fear­ing, six­teenth-cen­tu­ry-pam­phlet-study­ing pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture nev­er­the­less deployed mod­ern sound bites with as much indus­try as he scru­ti­nized them. Hence the endurance, over thir­ty years after his death and over forty years past the peak of his pop­u­lar­i­ty, of “The medi­um is the mes­sage,” a phrase that, seem­ing­ly since the moment McLuhan first uttered it, has stood as a light­ning rod to his detrac­tors.

Very often, some­one will insist that, no, the con­tent of a mes­sage mat­ters too, mak­ing the pro­nounce­ment with the atti­tude of hav­ing seen through the emper­or’s clothes. A dis­em­bod­ied voice makes a sim­i­lar crit­i­cism of McLuhan’s crit­ics in The Medi­um is the Mas­sage, the 1968 album that mir­rors both the con­tent and the dense, exper­i­men­tal visu­al col­lage form of McLuhan and graph­ic design­er Quentin Fiore’s epony­mous book. Lis­ten to the album (side A, side B) at UBUwe­b’s Mar­shall McLuhan sound archive and get an aur­al glimpse into the mind that, upon receiv­ing a proof of his book back from the print­er’s with the title mis­spelled, sud­den­ly real­ized that only the word Mas­sage, with con­no­ta­tions of the mass media in whose age he lived, expressed the full extent of his mean­ing. But he did believe that the very exis­tence of the tele­phone or tele­vi­sion, and the effects of their exis­tence on human­i­ty as a whole, made for an infi­nite­ly rich­er object of study than what­ev­er con­tent humans hap­pened to send across them. Through the pieces of media in this post, you can see and hear McLuhan expand upon this idea in his delib­er­ate, ora­tor­i­cal­ly metaphor­i­cal, some­times mad­den­ing­ly oblique man­ner. He works through the impli­ca­tions of, exten­sions of, and pos­si­ble con­tra­dic­tions to this odd­ly robust notion, which some, in our hyper­com­mu­nica­tive, end­less­ly medi­at­ed inter­net age, would in hind­sight call prophe­cy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing

Mar­shall McLuhan: The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

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

An Easy, Scientifically-Proven Way to Make Yourself Smarter. Go for a Good Walk or Swim Every Day

in Life, Science, Video - Science | April 21st, 2012

This week, The New York Times gave us some good news. Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Gretchen Reynolds, a decade of research by neu­ro­sci­en­tists and phys­i­ol­o­gists shows fair­ly con­vinc­ing­ly that exer­cise can make you smarter. She writes:

Using sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nolo­gies to exam­ine the work­ings of indi­vid­ual neu­rons — and the make­up of brain mat­ter itself — sci­en­tists in just the past few months have dis­cov­ered that exer­cise appears to build a brain that resists phys­i­cal shrink­age and enhance cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­i­ty. Exer­cise, the lat­est neu­ro­science sug­gests, does more to bol­ster think­ing than think­ing does.

There’s appar­ent­ly a lot to be gained from a sim­ple dai­ly walk (assum­ing it checks out with your doc­tor). And, as the video below shows, the gains goes beyond cog­ni­tion itself:

The pho­to above was pro­vid­ed cour­tesy of Big­Stock­Pho­to

Celestial Lights: Spectacular Auroras Move Across the Scandinavian Skies

in Astronomy, Film, Photography | April 20th, 2012

Nor­we­gian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ole C. Salomon­sen has cre­at­ed a stun­ning time-lapse film of the auro­ra bore­alis over rugged Nordic land­scapes.

Salomon­sen lives in the city of Trom­sø, 200 miles north of the Arc­tic Cir­cle, where the sun does­n’t rise above the hori­zon between Novem­ber and Jan­u­ary. Trom­sø is con­sid­ered one of the best (inhab­it­ed) places on Earth to see North­ern Lights. This past win­ter the light show was par­tic­u­lar­ly intense, as the sun moved clos­er to the peak (expect­ed in ear­ly 2013) of its 11-year cycle of elec­tro­mag­net­ic activ­i­ty.

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er went to extra­or­di­nary lengths to cap­ture these images, trav­el­ing across north­ern Nor­way, Swe­den and Fin­land over a half-year peri­od begin­ning in Sep­tem­ber and end­ing ear­li­er this month, when the day­light hours grew too long. “I have dri­ven thou­sands of km between loca­tions up here in the arc­tic this sea­son,” Salomon­sen writes on his Vimeo page. “I was run­ning between 2–3 cam­eras like a mad­man.” He esti­mates he shot about 150,000 expo­sures to get the 6,000 or so frames used in the four-and-a-half-minute video above. He writes:

The video is a merge of two parts; the first part con­tains some more wild and aggres­sive auro­ras, as well as a few milky way sequences, hence either auro­ras are mov­ing fast because they are, or they are fast due to motion of the milky way/stars. Still, some of the strait up shots are very close to real-time speed, although auro­ras most­ly are slow­er, she can also be FAST! The sec­ond part has some more slow and majes­tic auro­ras, where I have focused more on com­po­si­tion and fore­ground.

The music is by Nor­we­gian com­pos­er Kai-Anders Ryan. To learn about the tech­ni­cal aspects of Celes­tial Lights, and to see the film Salomon­sen made dur­ing last year’s auro­ra sea­son, vis­it his Vimeo page. And to see his beau­ti­ful still images, vis­it Salomon­sen on Face­book and Flikr.

via Uni­verse Today

Martin Scorsese Captures Levon Helm and The Band Performing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz

in Music | April 20th, 2012

Born in Arkansas in 1940, Lev­on Helm grew up lis­ten­ing Elvis Pres­ley, Lit­tle Richard, John­ny Cash and Jer­ry Lee Lewis. By the 1960s, he began putting his per­son­al stamp on rock ’n’ roll. Dur­ing those years, Helm and gui­tarist Rob­bie Robert­son joined Bob Dylan’s ever-so-con­tro­ver­sial elec­tric band and played togeth­er dur­ing the infa­mous­ly tumul­tuous 1966 tour. Then, Helm and Robert­son decid­ed to form their own band — The Band. Robert­son wrote or co-wrote most of their songs, while Helm often gave voice to them. And so things went until they did­n’t.

In 1976, The Band broke up, but not before they played an epic final con­cert that Mar­tin Scors­ese doc­u­ment­ed for pos­ter­i­ty in his film, The Last Waltz. Decades lat­er, many crit­ics con­sid­er it “the great­est rock con­cert movie ever made.” And although the film con­sist­ed most­ly of live footage from their farewell con­cert in San Fran­cis­co, Scors­ese filmed one of The Band’s mem­o­rable songs, “The Weight,” on an MGM sound­stage. You can find the per­for­mance above, and Lev­on Helm singing soul­ful­ly on drums. The scene also fea­tures a guest appear­ance by Mavis Sta­ples, along with her father and sis­ters in The Sta­ple Singers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Luc Godard Films The Rolling Stones Record­ing “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il” (1968)

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

The Geometry of Sound Waves Visualized

in Video - Science | April 19th, 2012

Turn down your speak­ers …  but not all of the way off. Now see what sound waves look like when they’re visu­al­ized and the geo­met­ric pat­terns they make. They’re called Chlad­ni pat­terns, and they get their name from Ernst Chlad­ni (1756–1827), a Ger­man physi­cist and musi­cian whose work earned him the title, “The Father of Acoustics.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

Mag­net­ic Fields Made Vis­i­ble

Futur­ist Arthur C. Clarke on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

Roger McGuinn, Frontman of The Byrds, Curates Folk Den, Lets You Download Free Folk Music

in Music | April 19th, 2012

Roger McGuinn of the Byrds was one of the most influ­en­tial singers and gui­tarists of the 1960s. Although his own influ­ences range from Ravi Shankar to John Coltrane, McGuin­n’s roots are in folk music. The Byrds were among the first to fuse folk with rock and roll. “I’ve always con­sid­ered myself a folksinger,” McGuinn told Neal Conan this week on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, “even though we strapped on Rick­en­backer gui­tars and played pret­ty loud. But I was a folksinger at heart because we always loved folk music. I loved the melodies and the sto­ries.”

In the mid 1990s McGuinn was lis­ten­ing to a Smith­son­ian Folk­ways record when it occurred to him that he was­n’t hear­ing tra­di­tion­al songs played any­more, even in folk clubs. “So I thought, ‘What’s going to hap­pen when Odet­ta dies?’ Well, as you know, she just passed away. And Pete Seeger’s, what, he’s 92, 93. He’s get­ting up there. So I thought I’d do some­thing about it.”

McGuinn had always been an ear­ly adopter of new tech­nolo­gies. He owned a mobile tele­phone in the ear­ly 1970s and bought his first per­son­al com­put­er in 1981. So in 1995 he got the idea of estab­lish­ing Folk Den, a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to pre­serv­ing the tra­di­tion­al folk music that he loves. On the first day of each month, McGuinn posts a new song.  There are now almost 200 MP3 files online, avail­able for free down­load. In some of the record­ings McGuinn is joined by his wife, Camil­la. To get the fla­vor of what’s avail­able, here are three quick exam­ples:

• Bar­bara Allen
• St. James Infir­mary
• Titan­ic

But you real­ly must vis­it the Folk Den Web site, which includes lyrics, chords, visu­al mate­r­i­al and a lit­tle intro­duc­tion to each song writ­ten by McGuinn. And to hear McGuin­n’s Talk of the Nation inter­view, which includes musi­cal per­for­mances, vis­it the NPR Web site.

Coursera Adds Humanities Courses, Raises $16 Million, Strikes Deal with 3 Universities

in Online Courses | April 18th, 2012

Dur­ing the past two months, two ven­tures offer­ing free MOOCS (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) have spun out of Stan­ford. One is Udac­i­ty run by Sebas­t­ian Thrun. And the oth­er is Cours­era, which announced a slew of big news today.

To start with, it raised $16 mil­lion in fund­ing from ven­ture cap­i­tal firms Klein­er Perkins Cau­field & Byers and New Enter­prise Asso­ciates.

Next it announced agree­ments to offer cours­es by Prince­ton, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan (in addi­tion to Stan­ford).

And final­ly it has added human­i­ties cours­es to its upcom­ing fall cur­ricu­lum — a depar­ture from the MOOC norm of only offer­ing cours­es in com­put­er sci­ence & engi­neer­ing. Cours­es include:

• A His­to­ry of the World since 1300 (Prince­ton)
• Fan­ta­sy and Sci­ence Fic­tion: The Human Mind, Our Mod­ern World (Michi­gan)
• Greek and Roman Mythol­o­gy (Penn)
• Lis­ten­ing to World Music (Penn)
• Mod­ern & Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can Poet­ry (Penn)

The cours­es will get start­ed in the Fall. In the mean­time, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, MIT, Yale, Har­vard, Oxford and beyond.

Frankenweenie: Tim Burton Turns Frankenstein Tale into Disney Kids Film (1984)

in Film, K-12 | April 18th, 2012

When Tim Bur­ton was 25 years old The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny gave him a bud­get of almost a mil­lion dol­lars to make a movie about a boy and his dog. It’s the usu­al sto­ry, except that the dog is run over by a car and the boy’s name is Vic­tor Franken­stein.

We don’t want to give away too much of the plot. Let’s just say that jumper cables are involved.

Bur­ton had been recruit­ed by Dis­ney in 1979, when he grad­u­at­ed from art school. In cer­tain ways it was a dream job, but there was fric­tion right from the begin­ning. Bur­ton and Dis­ney were a strange match. He start­ed out as an ani­ma­tor on The Fox and the Hound. “It was like Chi­nese water tor­ture,” he says in Bur­ton on Bur­ton. “Imag­ine draw­ing a cute fox with Sandy Dun­can’s voice for three years.”

After his time in cute-fox pur­ga­to­ry, Bur­ton got a chance to express his goth­ic imag­i­na­tion in Vin­cent, a six-minute ani­mat­ed film nar­rat­ed by his boy­hood idol, Vin­cent Price. The film impressed peo­ple, but the stu­dio did­n’t quite know what to do with it. “I felt very hap­py to have made it,” Bur­ton says in the book. “It was a lit­tle odd, though, because Dis­ney seemed to be pleased with it, but at the same time kind of ashamed.”

At about that time the com­pa­ny was devel­op­ing a project for tele­vi­sion called The Dis­ney Chan­nel, which fea­tured a series on fairy tales. Bur­ton’s idea was to do a ver­sion of Hansel and Gre­tel with an all-Japan­ese cast and a big kung-fu fight at the end. Some­how he man­aged to receive a green light for the project, and it became his first live-action film. “I had a room filled with draw­ings,” he says, “and I think that was the thing that made them feel com­fort­able about me, to some degree. Even though, visu­al­ly, the draw­ings aren’t easy to imag­ine in three dimen­sions, or in any oth­er form than those draw­ings, I think it made them feel I was­n’t com­plete­ly insane, and that I could actu­al­ly do some­thing.”

Hansel and Gre­tel was an impor­tant step­ping stone for the project that had been per­co­lat­ing in Bur­ton’s sub­con­scious since he was a hor­ror film-obsessed child grow­ing up in Bur­bank, Cal­i­for­nia. The idea of tak­ing the clas­sic Franken­stein tale and trans­form­ing it into a chil­dren’s sto­ry about an Amer­i­can boy and his beloved dog some­how seemed nat­ur­al to Bur­ton. He saw echoes of James Whale’s clas­sic film, and its sequels, all around him. He says:

What was great was that you almost did­n’t even have to think about it, because grow­ing up in sub­ur­bia there were these minia­ture golf cours­es with wind­mills which were just like the one in Franken­stein. These images just hap­pened to coin­cide, because that was your life. There were poo­dles that always remind­ed you of the bride of Franken­stein with the big hair. All those things were just there. That’s why it felt so right or easy for me to do–those images were already there in Bur­bank.

Although the film would even­tu­al­ly get Bur­ton into hot water with Dis­ney, Franken­wee­nie marks a mile­stone in his devel­op­ment as a film­mak­er. As Aurélien Fer­enczi writes in Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma: Tim Bur­ton, “the seeds of Edward Scis­sorhands are already vis­i­ble in Franken­wee­nie.” The 30-minute film, which can be viewed above in its entire­ty, stars Bar­ret Oliv­er as the young Vic­tor Franken­stein and Daniel Stern and Shel­ley Duvall as his par­ents. The sto­ry was writ­ten in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leonard Ripps, based on Bur­ton’s sketch­es and their shared emo­tion­al respons­es to the 1931 Franken­stein. Says Bur­ton:

Some­thing that’s always been very impor­tant to me is not to make a direct link­age. If I was to sit down with some­body, and we were to look at a scene from Franken­stein and say ‘Let’s do that’, I would­n’t do it, even if it’s a homage or an inspired-by kind of thing. In fact, if I ever use a direct link to some­thing, I try to make sure in my own mind that it’s not a case of ‘Let’s copy that’. Instead it’s, ‘Why do I like that, what’s the emo­tion­al con­text in this new for­mat?’ That’s why I always try to gauge if peo­ple get me and are on a sim­i­lar wave­length. The writer Lenny Ripps was that way. he got it. He did­n’t want to sit there and go over Franken­stein; he knew it well enough. It’s more like it’s being fil­tered through some sort of remem­brance.

The film was com­plet­ed in 1984, and was intend­ed to be screened with a re-release of Pinoc­chio, but dis­as­ter struck. The Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca gave Franken­wee­nie a PG rat­ing. Dis­ney could­n’t show a PG film with the G‑rated Pinoc­chio. The stu­dio exec­u­tives were furi­ous. “I was a lit­tle shocked,” Bur­ton says, “because I don’t see what’s PG about the film: there’s no bad lan­guage, there’s only one bit of vio­lence, and the vio­lence hap­pens off-cam­era. So I said to the MPAA, ‘What do I need to get a G rat­ing?’ and they basi­cal­ly said, ‘Thre’s noth­ing you can cut, it’s just the tone.’ I think it was the fact that it was in black and white that freaked them out. There’s noth­ing bad in the movie.”

There are dif­fer­ing accounts on whether Bur­ton was fired or quit, but in any case Franken­wee­nie marked the end of Bur­ton’s employ­ment at Dis­ney. But enough peo­ple saw the film and rec­og­nized Bur­ton’s bril­liance that he was able to move on to the next phase of his career. One of those peo­ple was Stephen King, who gave a tape of Franken­wee­nie to an exec­u­tive at Warn­er Bros. who was look­ing for a fresh tal­ent to direct a movie star­ring Pee-wee Her­man. This Fall, Bur­ton will have his tri­umphal revenge when Dis­ney brings out an IMAX 3D ani­mat­ed remake of Franken­wee­nie. You can watch the trail­er below: