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Free Today: Watch Online the Pioneering Films of the Late Chantal Akerman

Those who watch and dis­like Chan­tal Aker­man’s best-known film, Jeanne Diel­man, 23 quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles, often com­plain that “noth­ing hap­pens” in it. But in my expe­ri­ence of intro­duc­ing it — nay, evan­ge­liz­ing for it — to friends, it usu­al­ly only takes a sol­id view­ing or two of that 1975 three-hour-and-twen­ty-minute tale of a Bel­gian sin­gle moth­er’s days and nights spent cook­ing (a short clip of which you can see above), clean­ing, and pos­si­bly engag­ing in pros­ti­tu­tion to feel — or at least in the imme­di­ate after­math of view­ing, feel — that in no movie but Jeanne Diel­man, 23 quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles does any­thing tru­ly hap­pen. Every oth­er movie plays, by com­par­i­son, as if on fast-for­ward, or like a set of filmed Clif­f’s Notes.

Clear­ly, Aker­man saw, and real­ized, a wider sto­ry­telling poten­tial in cin­e­ma than do most film­mak­ers. So much worse the loss, then, when she died ear­li­er this month, leav­ing behind a fil­mog­ra­phy con­sist­ing of not just her ear­ly mas­ter­piece Jeanne Diel­man, which she direct­ed at just 25 years of age, but a vari­ety of fea­ture films and shorts made between 1968 and this year. As a trib­ute, the cinephile-beloved home video com­pa­ny The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion has, for a very lim­it­ed time, made all of their Aker­man films free to view on Hulu (unfor­tu­nate­ly, for view­ers in cer­tain ter­ri­to­ries only), includ­ing 1978’s Les ren­dezvous d’An­na, embed­ded just above, 1972’s Hotel Mon­terey and La cham­bre, 1975’s Je tu il elle, 1976’s News from Home…

… and of course, Jeanne Diel­man. If you plan to enjoy a free Aker­man marathon on Hulu thanks to Criteron, you’d bet­ter do it soon, since they’ll only remain free to view through the next day. And do invite all your most cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly adven­tur­ous friends to join your side, as with most auteur films, the inter­est that does­n’t lie in watch­ing them lies in argu­ing about their mer­its after­ward. You can hear one such fun con­ver­sa­tion on a 2011 episode of The Cri­te­ri­on­cast, a pod­cast ded­i­cat­ed to films released by the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, just above. It actu­al­ly fea­tures yours tru­ly as the spe­cial guest, dis­cussing Jeanne Diel­man with the reg­u­lar pan­elists. Do you side with the likes of an Aker­man par­ti­san like me, or does your opin­ion most close­ly resem­ble one of the oth­ers who does­n’t take quite such a rich expe­ri­ence from their every view­ing? Today, you can find out where you stand on this and oth­er of Aker­man’s fas­ci­nat­ing works for free. And you can always find many more free films in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ambi­tious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Film­mak­ers

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

What Films Should Get Into The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion? Video Series “Three Rea­sons” Makes the Case

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Terry Gilliam’s Lost Animations from Monty Python and the Holy Grail Are Now Online

This year marks the 40th anniver­sary of Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail and as the group has always been upfront about shame­less­ly milk­ing their fans for cash, there’s a new ver­sion of the Blu-Ray out, and a new print tour­ing the world. John Cleese and Eric Idle are cur­rent­ly also on an Amer­i­can tour, shar­ing the stage as a duo for the first time. Michael Palin has a book tour for the third vol­ume of his diaries. Ter­ry Jones is still work­ing on movies and plug­ging char­i­ties on his Twit­ter stream. Ter­ry Gilliam has an auto­bi­og­ra­phy com­ing out this month. And Gra­ham Chap­man, despite his beau­ti­ful plumage, is still dead.

How­ev­er, the Pythons are giv­ing a few things away and one of them is the above com­pi­la­tion of unused ani­ma­tions by Gilliam from the Holy Grail. They can be found on the new Blu-Ray, but the group’s offi­cial Youtube chan­nel is shar­ing them-—first with Gilliam’s com­men­tary, then with sound effects—for free.

These ani­ma­tions are links between the skits that make up Holy Grail, and include drag­ons, giants, and a very large snail. Gilliam took a lot of the illus­tra­tions that he didn’t do him­self from a book on illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, and, see­ing them all togeth­er in one go, one can imag­ine an alter­na­tive uni­verse where the ani­ma­tor makes an entire movie this way. (On the com­men­tary track, he half-jok­ing­ly describes him­self as “the man who could have gone on to become a great ani­ma­tor but was forced into live action film.”)

As per Python, a lot of the com­men­tary track berates the view­er for throw­ing mon­ey away on a redun­dant ver­sion of what the con­sumer prob­a­bly owns, and how Gilliam isn’t get­ting paid enough to do this. (Cue some coinage sound effects and Gilliam gets back on mic.)

If this kind of archiv­ing is going on, it would be inter­est­ing to know the sta­tus of Gilliam’s oth­er ani­ma­tions for both Python and the var­i­ous shows he did in the years run­ning up to it. There are indeed some inter­est­ing ear­ly works out there that need a facelift.

As for Gilliam and the Holy Grail, he says he doesn’t watch it:

I’m glad it makes a lot of mon­ey and keeps me in the style I’ve grown accus­tomed to. But watch it again? Why? We’ve got lives to lead.

via Digg

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ter­ry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions: A 1974 How-To Guide

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imag­ined as an Epic, Main­stream Hol­ly­wood Film

Watch Ter­ry Gilliam’s Ani­mat­ed Short, The Christ­mas Card (1968)

John Cleese’s Eulo­gy for Gra­ham Chap­man: ‘Good Rid­dance, the Free-Load­ing Bas­tard, I Hope He Fries’

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Polyphonic Overtone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Last year we drew your atten­tion to the video above from Munich-based singer Anna-Maria Hefele in which she gives us a stun­ning demon­stra­tion of poly­phon­ic over­tone singing. It’s a tech­nique com­mon to Tuva, Inu­it, and Xhosa cul­tures but large­ly unfa­mil­iar to us in West­ern music.

Many read­ers point­ed out that Hefele’s fine exam­ple of her tech­nique did not in fact show us how to do it, only that it could be done in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent, all equal­ly impres­sive, ways. Well, today, we bring you a series of lessons Hefele has post­ed as a response to her first video’s pop­u­lar­i­ty. In each of these videos, she offers detailed instruc­tions on how to har­ness the pow­er of your voice to sing two notes at once.

Before begin­ning Hefele’s course, you may wish to get a more the­o­ret­i­cal overview of how poly­phon­ic singing works. For that pur­pose, the video above gives us a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the over­tones in Hefele’s voice. As she demon­strates via spec­tro­gram, her nor­mal singing voice con­tains sev­er­al tones at once already, which we typ­i­cal­ly hear as only one note. Sim­i­lar­ly, eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gist and stu­dent of throat singing Mark van Ton­geren explains at Smith­son­ian Folk­ways, “every­one con­tin­u­ous­ly when you’re speak­ing [or singing] pro­duces a whole spec­trum of sound.” The throat singing method involves alter­ing the voice to enhance over­tones. Hefele uses some slight­ly dif­fer­ent tech­niques to “fil­ter,” as she puts it, spe­cif­ic tones in her voice.

The first intro­duc­tion to the over­tone fil­ter­ing tech­nique comes to us in Les­son 1 above. Hefele demon­strates how to move from tone to tone by grad­u­al­ly tran­si­tion­ing to dif­fer­ent vow­el sounds. She also teas­es the sec­ond and third lessons, below, which show how to ampli­fy spe­cif­ic tones once you have iso­lat­ed them. Hefele is a per­son­able and engag­ing instructor—she would, I imag­ine, make an excel­lent lan­guage teacher as well—and her cheeky pre­sen­ta­tion takes us into the show­er with her in Les­son 2, the best place, unsur­pris­ing­ly, to prac­tice your poly­phon­ic over­tone singing. And to hear how Hefele uses her vocal tech­niques in beau­ti­ful­ly haunt­ing, almost oth­er­world­ly music, make sure to watch this solo per­for­mance from 2012 or hear this Hilde­gard von Bin­gen choral com­po­si­tion adapt­ed to Hefele’s poly­phon­ic solo voice.

H/T Natal­ie in the UK

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Stephen Sond­heim Teach a Kid How to Sing “Send In the Clowns”

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

Dutch­man Mas­ters the Art of Singing Led Zeppelin’s “Stair­way to Heav­en” Back­wards

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

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Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative

If you want to pre­pare for a career prac­tic­ing law, you could do much worse than join­ing Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s debate team. But if, far on the oth­er end of the spec­trum of the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than col­lege, you need not relin­quish your dreams of excelling at this tra­di­tion­al intel­lec­tu­al sport. We now have the prece­dent to prove it: “Months after win­ning a nation­al title,” reports the Guardian’s Lau­ren Gam­bi­no, “Harvard’s debate team has fall­en to a group of New York prison inmates.”

“The show­down,” which revolved around the ques­tion of whether pub­lic schools should be allowed to turn away undoc­u­ment­ed stu­dents, “took place at the East­ern cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty in New York, a max­i­mum-secu­ri­ty prison where con­victs can take cours­es taught by fac­ul­ty from near­by Bard Col­lege, and where inmates have formed a pop­u­lar debate club.” They call this pro­gram the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard Col­lege degree (through a non-voca­tion­al “lib­er­al arts cur­ricu­lum, includ­ing lit­er­a­ture, for­eign lan­guage, phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry and the social sci­ences, math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, and the arts”) at satel­lite cam­pus­es estab­lished in six New York state pris­ons. You can see this selec­tive, rig­or­ous and high­ly unusu­al edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion in action in the Wash­ing­ton Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour pro­file below.

The Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive’s debate vic­to­ry over Har­vard made for a notable event in the pro­gram’s his­to­ry indeed. “But it’s also worth point­ing out,” writes Peter Hol­ley, author of the Post arti­cle, “the fal­la­cy of our under­ly­ing assump­tions about such a matchup — the first (and most per­ni­cious) being that crim­i­nals aren’t smart. If a defin­i­tive link between crim­i­nal­i­ty and below-aver­age intel­li­gence exists, nobody has found it.” The Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive has oper­at­ed on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s pre­vi­ous high-pro­file win saw it beat­ing that of West Point — all, you may hard­ly believe, through old-fash­ioned research, with­out any kind of access to the inter­net. If you’d like to leave your con­do­lences for the Har­vard Col­lege Debat­ing Union, you may do so at their Face­book page. You can also make a worth­while finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion to the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Bald­win Debates Mal­colm X (1963) and William F. Buck­ley (1965): Vin­tage Video & Audio

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

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

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Great Leonard Nimoy Reads H.G. Wells’ Seminal Sci-Fi Novel The War of the Worlds

As you know if you saw our pre­vi­ous posts fea­tur­ing Leonard Nimoy’s read­ings of sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury and Isaac Asi­mov, the late Star Trek icon could — unsur­pris­ing­ly, per­haps — tell a sci­ence-fic­tion tale with the best of them. It turns out that he could also give mas­ter­ful read­ings of sci­ence fic­tion from oth­er eras too, as far back as the ear­li­est works to define the genre, which we’ve dis­cov­ered after hear­ing his per­for­mance of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, an out-of-print edi­tion recent­ly dig­i­tized from cas­sette tape and post­ed to Youtube in two parts.

With this sto­ry of Earth invad­ed from “across the gulf of space” by aliens with “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that per­ish, intel­lects vast and cool and unsym­pa­thet­ic,” Wells did much to help give sci­ence fic­tion the form we rec­og­nize today. The War of the Worlds came out in book form in 1898, pre­ced­ed by such sim­i­lar­ly spec­u­la­tive and inno­v­a­tive works as The Time Machine and The Invis­i­ble Man, and then fol­lowed by the likes of The First Men in the Moon and The Shape of Things to Come. (Find most of these works neat­ly pack­aged in the HG Wells Clas­sic Col­lec­tion.) This Leonard Nimoy record­ing orig­i­nal­ly came out in 1976, pub­lished by the record label Caed­mon, known for doing plen­ty of inno­va­tion of their own in the then-yet-unnamed field of audio­books.

Caed­mon put out not just this album and the one with Nimoy read­ing Brad­bury, but oth­ers fea­tur­ing Kurt Von­negut, Vin­cent Price, Ten­nessee Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hem­ing­way, and Sylvia Plath. As much as sci­ence-fic­tion die-hards will enjoy hear­ing this pair­ing of Nimoy and Wells here, some will cer­tain­ly want to track down the actu­al LP — not just for the col­lec­tors’ val­ue, but because it fea­tures lin­er notes by none oth­er than that oth­er vast­ly influ­en­tial cre­ator of sci-fi as we know it, Isaac Asi­mov. It looks like there’s one used copy on Ama­zon. The read­ing, we should note, is an abridged ver­sion of the orig­i­nal text.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Sto­ry “The Last Ques­tion” Read by Isaac Asi­mov— and by Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Gandhi Talk in His First Filmed Interview (1947)

The Gand­hi of his­to­ry doesn’t line up with the Gand­hi of leg­end, just as the beat­i­fied Moth­er Tere­sa presents a very dif­fer­ent pic­ture in cer­tain astute crit­ics’ esti­ma­tion. But as with most saints, ancient and mod­ern, peo­ple tend to ignore Gandhi’s many con­tra­dic­tions and trou­bling­ly racist and casteist views. He comes to us more as myth and mar­tyr than deeply flawed human indi­vid­ual. An indis­pens­able part of the myth­mak­ing, Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biopic, Gand­hi, may be “over-san­i­tized,” as The Guardian writes, but Ben Kingsley’s per­for­mance as the anti-colo­nial leader is gen­uine­ly “sub­lime” in his evo­ca­tion of Gandhi’s “inten­si­ty… wit and even the dis­tinc­tive, deter­mined walk.” It’s these per­son­al qualities—and of course Gandhi’s defeat of the largest empire on the plan­et with non­vi­o­lent action and a spir­i­tu­al phi­los­o­phy—that con­tin­ue to inspire move­ments for jus­tice and civ­il rights.

We see a lit­tle of that deter­mined walk in the short news­reel inter­view above, the very first “talk­ing pic­ture” made of Gand­hi, and we also hear his inten­si­ty and wit, though much sub­dued by his phys­i­cal frailty after years of fast­ing. Tak­en in 1947 by Fox Movi­etone News, the film marks a piv­otal peri­od in the Indi­an leader’s life. Very short­ly after this Par­lia­ment passed the Indi­an Inde­pen­dence Act. That year also marked the start of a bloody new strug­gle, insti­gat­ed by anoth­er colo­nial inter­ven­tion, as the British par­ti­tioned India into two war­ring coun­tries, an act so poignant­ly dra­ma­tized in Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Chil­dren.

This year of tur­moil was also Gandhi’s last; he was assas­si­nat­ed in 1948 by a Hin­du nation­al­ist who accused him of sid­ing with Pak­istan. In the inter­view, we hear what we might think of as some of Gandhi’s final pub­lic pro­nounce­ments on such sub­jects as child mar­riage, pro­hi­bi­tion, his deeply held con­vic­tions about an authen­tic Indi­an cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, and the lengths that he would go for his country’s inde­pen­dence. At the end of the short inter­view, the Amer­i­can reporter asks Gand­hi, pre­scient­ly, “would you be pre­pared to die in the cause of India’s Inde­pen­dence?” to which Gand­hi replies, “this is a bad ques­tion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tol­stoy and Gand­hi Exchange Let­ters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gen­tle­ness, Humil­i­ty & Love (1909)

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Exis­tence of God (1931)

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

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20 New Lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh Discovered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Story

The Epic of Gil­gamesh, one of the old­est nar­ra­tives in the world, got a sur­prise update last month when the Sulay­maniyah Muse­um in the Kur­dis­tan region of Iraq announced that it had dis­cov­ered 20 new lines of the Baby­lon­ian-Era poem of gods, mor­tals, and mon­sters. Since the poem has exist­ed in frag­ments since the 18th cen­tu­ry BC, there has always been the pos­si­bil­i­ty that more would turn up. And yet the ver­sion we’re famil­iar with — the one dis­cov­ered in 1853 in Nin­eveh — has­n’t changed very much over recent decades. The text remained fair­ly fixed — that is, until the fall of Bagh­dad in 2003 and the intense loot­ing that fol­lowed yield­ed some­thing new.

Since that time, the His­to­ry Blog notes:

the [Sulay­maniyah] muse­um has a mat­ter of pol­i­cy paid smug­glers to keep arti­facts from leav­ing the coun­try, no ques­tions asked. The tablet was acquired by the muse­um in late 2011 as part of a col­lec­tion of 80–90 tablets sold by an unnamed shady char­ac­ter. Pro­fes­sor Farouk Al-Rawi exam­ined the col­lec­tion while the sell­er hag­gled with muse­um offi­cial Abdul­lah Hashim. When Al-Rawi saw this tablet, he told Hashim to pay what­ev­er the sell­er want­ed: $800.

That’s a pret­ty good deal for these extra lines that not only add to the poem’s length, but have now cleared up some of the mys­ter­ies in the oth­er chap­ters. These lines come from Chap­ter Five of the epic and cast the main char­ac­ters in a new light. Gil­gamesh and his com­pan­ion Enkidu are shown to feel guilt over killing Hum­ba­ba, the guardian of the cedar for­est, who is now seen as less a mon­ster and more a king. Just like a good director’s cut, these extra scenes clear up some mud­dy char­ac­ter moti­va­tion, and add an envi­ron­men­tal moral to the tale.

new lines of gilgamesh

The His­to­ry Blog arti­cle has an in depth descrip­tion of the trans­la­tion, with links to a schol­ar­ly paper on this very impor­tant find, and prompts the ques­tion, how much more is there to be dis­cov­ered?

In the video above, Hazha Jalal, man­ag­er of the tablet’s sec­tion of the Sulay­maniyah Muse­um talks (in Kur­dish) about the new dis­cov­ery, say­ing (in trans­la­tion): “The tablet dates back to the Neo-Bably­on­ian peri­od, 2000–1500 BCE. It is a part of tablet V of the epic. It was acquired by the Muse­um in the year 2011 and [then] Dr. Farouk Al-Raw translit­er­at­ed it. It was writ­ten as a poem and many new things this ver­sion has added, for exam­ple Gil­gamesh and his friend met a mon­key. We are hon­ored to house this tablet and any­one can vis­it the Muse­um dur­ing its open­ing hours from 8:30 morn­ing to noon. The entry is free for you and your guests. Thank you.”

In the mean­time, if you’ve got a few min­utes to spare, you can click here to Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia.

You can also find the epic in our twin col­lec­tions, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

via The His­to­ry Blog

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts President

Art is speech. Art is what life is about. 

A rous­ing sen­ti­ment, and one rarely expressed by those run­ning for the nation’s high­est office.

Once a can­di­date has been safe­ly elect­ed, he may feel com­fort­able betray­ing a deep­er affin­i­ty, or ced­ing to the tastes of an arts-inclined First Lady. Sanders isn’t wait­ing, pledg­ing in the video above, that he will be an Arts Pres­i­dent.

The Amer­i­cans for the Arts Action Fund tracks the can­di­dates’ records with regard to arts advo­ca­cy, and it appears that Sanders has been walk­ing the walk for quite some time.

He filmed a half-hour long doc­u­men­tary about labor leader Eugene Debs.

He record­ed a 1987 folk album with the help of 30 Ver­mont musi­cians, stout­ly pro­nounc­ing the lyrics to “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flow­ers Gone” a la Rex Har­ri­son.

Vice’s Paul Best made a com­pelling case for how Bernie Sanders shaped the north­east punk scene.

If Allen Gins­berg could vote from beyond the grave, I’m pret­ty sure I know which lever he’d be pulling…

With regard to liv­ing celebri­ties, it’s no big sur­prise to see that Will Fer­rell, Susan Saran­don, and John C Reil­ly are among the artists sup­port­ing Bernie Sanders. Hol­ly­wood has long embraced lib­er­al can­di­dates. They are joined on the ever grow­ing list of Artists and Cul­tur­al Lead­ers for Bernie Sanders by musi­cians Jel­lo Biafra and The Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, come­di­ans Mar­garet Cho and Sarah Sil­ver­man, and graf­fi­ti artists Ron Eng­lish and Shep­ard Fairey, cre­ator of the Oba­ma Hope poster.

As Sanders fans wait to see whether Fairey will per­form a sim­i­lar ser­vice for his 2016 pick, Sten­cils for Bernie is tak­ing up the slack with down­load­able images for the DIY-inclined.

I pre­sume that it’s only a mat­ter of time before some young ani­ma­tor puts him or her­self at Sanders’ dis­pos­al, though I kind of hope not. The candidate’s short video is reas­sur­ing­ly devoid of the snap­py visu­als that have become a sta­ple of the form, thanks to such pop­u­lar series as Crash Course, CGP Grey, The School of Life, and TED Ed.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endear­ing­ly Bad Spo­ken Word Album, We Shall Over­come

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this month. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Adam Savage’s Animated Lesson on the Simple Ideas That Lead to Great Scientific Discoveries

Edu­ca­tor, indus­tri­al design fab­ri­ca­tor and Myth Busters cohost Adam Sav­age is dri­ven by curios­i­ty.

Sci­ence gets his wheels turn­ing faster than the notched disc Hip­poly­te Fizeau used to mea­sure the speed of light in 1849.

In his TED-Ed talk on how sim­ple ideas lead to sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies, above, Sav­age zips across the cen­turies to share the work of three game chang­ers — Fizeau, Eratos­thenes, and Richard Feyn­man (one of the de fac­to patron saints of sci­ence-relat­ed TED talks).

I found it dif­fi­cult to wrap my head around the sheer quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion Sav­age shoe­horns into the sev­en minute video, giv­ing sim­i­lar­ly vol­u­ble and omniv­o­rous math­mu­si­cian Vi Hart a run for her mon­ey. Clear­ly, he under­stands exact­ly what he’s talk­ing about, where­as I had to take the review quiz in an attempt to retain just a bit of this new-to-me mate­r­i­al.

I’m glad he glossed over Feynman’s child­hood fas­ci­na­tion with iner­tia in order to spend more time on the less­er known of his three sub­jects. Lit­tle Feynman’s obser­va­tion of his toy wag­on is charm­ing, but the Nobel Prize winner’s life became an open book to me with Jim Otta­viani and Leland Myrick’s excel­lent graph­ic biog­ra­phy. What’s left to dis­cov­er?

How about Eratos­thenes? I’d nev­er before heard of the Alexan­dri­an librar­i­an who cal­cu­lat­ed the Earth­’s cir­cum­fer­ence with aston­ish­ing accu­ra­cy around 200 BC. (It helped that he was good at math and geog­ra­phy, the lat­ter of which he invent­ed.) Inspi­ra­tion fuels the arts, much as it does sci­ence, and I’d like to learn more about him.

Dit­to Fizeau, whom Sav­age describes as a less sexy sci­en­tif­ic swash­buck­ler than method­i­cal fact check­er, which is what he was doing when he wound up crack­ing the speed of light in 1849. Two cen­turies ear­li­er Galileo used lanterns to deter­mine that light trav­els at least ten times faster than sound. Fizeau put Galileo’s num­ber to the test, exper­i­ment­ing with his notched wheel, a can­dle, and mir­rors and ulti­mate­ly set­ting the speed of light at a much more accu­rate 313,300 Km/s. Today’s mea­sure­ment of 299792.458 km/s was arrived at using tech­nol­o­gy unthink­able even a few decades ago.

Per­son­al­ly, I would nev­er think to mea­sure the speed of light with some­thing that sounds like a zoetrope, but I might write a play about some­one who did.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Deliv­ers the Great­est Sci­ence Ser­mon Ever

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Sam Har­ris: Sci­ence Can Answer Moral Ques­tions

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this fall. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare’s Othello and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (1940)

When F. Scott Fitzger­ald died in 1940 at the age of 44, he was con­sid­ered a trag­ic fail­ure. The New York Times eulo­gized him by writ­ing that “the promise of his bril­liant career was nev­er ful­filled.” Though he mas­ter­ful­ly cap­tured all the mad flash of the Jazz era and the dam­aged young men of the Lost Gen­er­a­tion, Fitzgerald’s nov­els hadn’t been ful­ly rec­og­nized for their great­ness at the time of his death. Now, of course, one could make a plau­si­ble argu­ment that The Great Gats­by is the great Amer­i­can nov­el of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Nonethe­less, there’s a lin­ger­ing sense of what could have been that hangs over the author’s life. How many more great books could have been writ­ten if it weren’t for his alco­holism, his bouts with depres­sion, or his famous­ly tem­pes­tu­ous rela­tion­ship with his wife Zel­da?

As the facts of his biog­ra­phy ossi­fy into leg­end, it’s always brac­ing to see some reminder of the man him­self. In the clips above and below you can lis­ten to his actu­al voice. For rea­sons that still remain unclear, Fitzger­ald record­ed him­self read­ing the works of William Shake­speare and John Keats in 1940, the last year of his life.

Above, you can see lis­ten to him read Othello’s speech to the Venet­ian Sen­a­tors from Act 1, Scene 3 of Oth­el­lo. While his deliv­ery doesn’t have the pol­ish of a trained Shake­speare­an actor, it does have a sonorous, emo­tive author­i­ty to it even when he stum­bles and slurs.

And here Fitzger­ald recites John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightin­gale” from mem­o­ry, which wasn’t quite as good, one imag­ines, as he hoped. Fitzger­ald flubs a bit here, skips a bit there, before grind­ing to a halt some­where around line 25. Still, it’s much bet­ter than I could have done.

Check the videos out. It might just give you a new appre­ci­a­tion for the author.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Cre­ates a List of 22 Essen­tial Books, 1936

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fitzger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Con­ju­gates “to Cock­tail,” the Ulti­mate Jazz-Age Verb (1928)

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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