Discovering Electronic Music: 1983 Documentary Offers a Fun & Educational Introduction to Electronic Music
The late sixties and seventies produced an explosion of electronic music that arrived on the scene as an almost entirely new art form. So much so that when composer Wendy Carlos released an album of Bach compositions played on the Moog synthesizer, it was as though she had invented another genre of music, rather than played baroque pieces on a new instrument. We had foremothers like Delia Derbyshire, experimental bands like Silver Apples and Suicide, innovators like Brian Eno and David Bowie and Kraftwerk, disco pioneers like Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer… the list of electronic musicians at work creating the genre before the 1980s could go on and on.
You won’t learn any of that from the 1983 documentary above, Discovering Electronic Music, which is not at all to damn the short film; on the contrary, what this presentation offers us is something entirely different from the usual survey course in great men and women of commercial music. With an understated, pedagogical tone, Discovering Electronic Music gently leads its viewers through a thoughtful introduction to electronic music itself—what it consists of, how it differs from acoustic music, what kind of equipment produces it, and how that equipment works.
There are many musicians featured here, but none of them stars. They demonstrate, with competency and professionalism, the ways various electronic instruments and (now seemingly prehistoric) computer systems work. We do hear lots of classical music played on synthesizers, though not by the enigmatic and reclusive Wendy Carlos. And we hear modern compositions as well, though few you’re likely to recognize, from “Jean-Claude Risset, Douglas Leedy, F.R. Moore, Stephan Soomil, Rory Kaplan, Geral Strang and more forgotten geniuses of early electronic music,” writes Electronic Beats.
Early in the film, its presenter talks about the specifically modern appeal of electronic music: composers can work directly with sound like a sculptor or painter, rather than composing on paper and waiting to hear that written music performed by musicians. Much of Discovering Electronic Music shows us composers and musicians doing just that, with the thoroughly matter-of-fact manner of the most compellingly dry public television documentaries and with the strangely soothing quality common to both Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Bob Ross’s painting lessons. Like the sound of the analog synthesizers and antique computer sequencers it features, the documentary has an eerie beauty all its own.
Find more documentaries in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Julia Child Marathon: 201 Episodes of “The French Chef” Streaming Free (for a Limited Time)
Had to give you a quick heads up on this:
Twitch.tv is launching a new Food Channel. And it’s getting things going with a marathon streaming of all 201 episodes of Julia Child’s now legendary TV series “The French Chef.”
Today, Twitch Creative is celebrating the joy of cooking with the launch of a brand new channel dedicated to all things food! Twitch.tv/Food will showcase cooking content 24/7 on Twitch Creative, and we’re kicking things off with an almighty marathon of all 201 episodes of Julia Child’s classic PBS cooking show, The French Chef.
If you click here, you can jump into the marathon viewing here. Twitch has more info on the marathon 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!
Read More...Watch 30 Films from the 1970s by Computer Animation Pioneer Lillian F. Schwartz
In the 1970s and 80s, a certain vivid, complex, and slightly frightening computer-graphics aesthetic rose in the zeitgeist. Though it has long passed into the realm of the retro, it remains imprinted on our minds, and we owe much of its look and feel to an artist named Lillian F. Schwartz. Trained in the art of Japanese calligraphy as a way of recovering from polio and later brought into the high technological ferment of late-1960s Bell Labs, Schwartz found herself well-placed to define what humanity would think of when they thought of the imagery generated by these promising new machines called computers.
Schwartz started creating a series of abstract films in the early 1970s, using not just computers but computers in combination with lasers, photographs, oil paints, and the full range of traditional film photography and editing gear.
You can watch 30 of her films on her web site, and at the top of this post you’ll find 1972’s Mutations. Schwartz’s site quotes the New York Times’ A.H. Weiler as describing its “changing dots, ectoplasmic shapes and electronic music” as “an eye-catching view of the potentials of the new techniques.”
Video-art fans will know the Paik video-synthesizer, or at least they’ll know Paik: Nam June Paik, that is, the Korean video artist who did plenty of artistic-technological pioneering of his own. Both he and Schwartz gave a great deal of thought to — and put a great deal of practice into — pushing the boundaries of technologies whose conventional uses the rest of us hadn’t quite learned yet. You can see Schwartz doing exactly that in The Artist and the Computer, the 1976 short documentary on her work, originally produced for AT&T, just above.
You can read more about Schwartz, back at Bell Labs and today, in the article “Art at the Edge of Tomorrow” by Jer Thorp. “I find it’s still an awesome experience to use a machine that — one can’t even fathom the speed,” she says in The Artist and the Computer as we watch her passing rows and rows of hulking mainframes with their racks of obscure peripherals and spinning reels of tape. “When you speak of nanoseconds, you can’t even grasp how fast these machines can work.” They work much faster now, of course, and we’ve grown used to it, even jaded about it — but Schwartz’s films capture our imaginations, in their inventive and eerie way, more than ever.
You can watch 30 of Schwartz’s pioneering films here.
via Monoskop
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.
Read More...Hear John Malkovich Read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Set to Music Mixed by Ric Ocasek, Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon, OMD & More
So, imagine that you’re John Malkovich. I know, you’ve seen this movie before, but hear me out: you’re one of the most venerated actors of your generation. You are entering your sixth decade and could probably coast into your golden years on accolades and prestige parts. But do you rest on your laurels? Or do you become a model and collaborator with photographer Sandro Miller, appear in an Eminem video… read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” over an ambient piece of music called “Cryogenia X,” then have the results remixed by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Ric Ocasek, new wave icons Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and other musical legends?
The answer is all of the above. You’re John Malkovich. You can do whatever you want. “When I have an idea for something,” says Malkovich, “I expect my collaborators to collaborate on that idea and if someone else has an idea, then I’ll certainly collaborate with them.” It’s that kind of disciplined, yet genial flexibility that made Malkovich perfect for the role of himself in Spike Jonze’s surreal comedy. Now the last of the projects in that extracurricular list above brings more surreality into Malkovich’s repertoire, in the form of a double LP’s‑worth of dreamlike recitations of Plato’s classical myth, called Like a Puppet Show, released on Black Friday of last year.
With original music composed by Eric Alexandrakis, the album came out on vinyl as a 2 LP picture disk featuring photos from Malkovich and Miller’s photo project “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.” The collaboration recalls other literary musical projects, such as Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs’ “The Priest They Called Him” (and Burroughs’ earlier work with Throbbing Gristle), as well as a recent joint project on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with Iggy Pop and electronic composer Alva Noto. But there’s also a disorienting strangeness here those other experiments lack.
Ono and Lennon’s version “Cryolife 7:14,” the second track above, is, oddly, the most conventional of the three digital uploads we get to hear for free. Malkovich reads a portion of the text straight through, over wordless moans from Yoko and psychedelic lounge music from Lennon. In OMD and Ric Ocasek’s renditions, however, Malkovich’s voice gets cut-up into a series of disjointed samples. Rather than tell a story—that ancient 2,500-year-old story from Plato’s Republic about ignorance and awakening—these pieces suggest painful poses, emotional shocks, repetitive conditions, and weird ontological angles. What does it all mean for Malkovich?
It’s hard to say. He’s more steeped in process than interpretation. “Music,” says Malkovich, “creates its own kind of dream state.” If there’s any political subtext, you’ll have to supply it yourself. Malkovich—who gamely dressed as Che Guevara in one of his Sandro Miller recreations of famous photographs—has also been described as “so Right-wing you have to wonder if he’s kidding.” We know, of course, how Yoko feels about things. It’s part of what makes the collaboration so fresh and compelling—it doesn’t feel like one of those “of course these people got together” projects that, while satisfying, can suffer the fate of the supergroup: too many cooks.
Here, each collaborator—the 2,000-years-dead philosopher, the celebrated actor and photographer, and the legendary musicians—comes from such a different realm of experience and talent that their meeting seems more like a mountaintop conference of wizards than a celebrity jam session. If you like what you hear (and see), Malkovich, Alexandrakis, and Miller promise more. They’ve founded a record label, Cryogenia, and plant to release more musical/photographic projects in the near future.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Download the Foo Fighters’ EP Saint Cecilia Free: MP3, FLAC, WAV, iTunes & Other Formats
This one slipped by me somehow. So let me flag it, in case it slipped by you too. Late last year, The Foo Fighters released online a free EP called Saint Cecilia, partly as a way to thank their fans for their steadfast support, and partly to help raise money for the victims of the horrific attacks in Paris. Recorded over the course of 11 days at the Hotel Saint Cecilia in Austin, Texas–a hotel named after the patron saint of musicians–the EP just became available in vinyl. Spin magazine calls Saint Cecilia the “Foo Fighters’ best record in years.” You can download it in MP3, Flac, WAV, and iTunes formats 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!
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Read More...
Hear the Musical Evolution of Frank Zappa in 401 Songs
Image by Helge Øverås, via Wikimedia Commons
“In spite of your insistence that you are not into Frank Zappa, avid fan Roger Von Lee believes that you would change your mind if you heard the right album. ‘You’re prejudiced, because the only Zappa you know is “Valley Girl” and “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow,“ ’ Von Lee says. ‘Seriously, you need to check out Hot Rats or Absolutely Free. Zappa and the Mothers were at their peak, and Zappa’s jazz-rock fusion experiments predate Bitches Brew. That’ll totally convince you that Zappa’s the shit.’ ” Or so reports a brief dispatch from The Onion, “Frank Zappa Fan Thinks You Just Haven’t Heard The Right Album,” which, like all their best work, resonated strongly with a certain segment of readers everywhere.
Like any artist who creates their own genre, Frank Zappa built up both a deeply loyal fan following and almost as deep a resistance among those who never found a way in. Or given Zappa’s prolificacy, which resulted in more than sixty albums recorded with his band The Mothers of Invention and otherwise, maybe we should say he created several of his own genres. And while this vastness and variety makes Zappa’s body of work that much richer and more rewarding to true believers, it also makes it even more intimidating to the neophyte. If you want a single experience that will give you a strong sense of just what makes Zappa’s musical journey so weird and wonderful — and what keeps fans coming back more than a quarter-century after the man’s death — have a listen to this Spotify playlist, Frank Zappa’s Musical Evolution (and if you don’t have Spotify, you can download and register free):
The playlist first appeared as a guest post on Spotify Classical, whose feats of musical curation we’ve featured before. “I assembled this playlist of 401 Zappa tracks that, for me, represent his best and most accessible musical compositions,” writes creator Kris Herbst, adding a bit about his own musical journey: “I became a Zappa fan in 1969, at the age of 13, when I was turned on to the We’re Only In It For The Money album by my Boy Scout troopmaster. Two years later, I went to my first Zappa concert, when the band included Flo and Eddie and Ian Underwood. Listening to Zappa helped open my mind to exploring a wide range of music, especially jazz.”
Feel free, as you listen to these 401 songs, to browse all the Zappa-related material we’ve previously featured linked below. And if you want to get a little more context, read the A.V. Club’s Frank Zappa primer, in which John Semley writes that, “like most of the things that attract and nurture the attention of pop-culture obsessives, Frank Zappa’s music is exceptionally rewarding. Zappa conceived of everything he did as part of a grand artistic mission,” a “comprehensive, totalizing concept of art that ranged between albums, concert films, and even interviews. Musical phrases, ideas, and even characters reappear across albums, providing theoretical and attitudinal connective tissue.”
And if that doesn’t intrigue you, well, just flip back to The Onion: “Von Lee added that if those two don’t get under your skin, he can recommend another 15 to 20 albums that will for sure.”
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When Frank Zappa & Miles Davis Played a Drug Dealer and a Pimp on Miami Vice
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.
Read More...See the First “Drum Machine,” the Rhythmicon from 1931, and the Modern Drum Machines That Followed Decades Later
When I think of early drum machines, I think of the Roland TR-808, the machine that changed pop music in 1980. I also think of its sibling, the Boss DR-55, rivals like the E‑Mu Drumulator, and predecessors from the 60s and 70s like the Maestro Rhythm King. I do not think of the Rhythmicon, nor did I know it had existed until very recently. I doubt many people have ever heard of it, yet it can probably claim the title of the first drum machine—or at least first rhythm machine—ever built.
The machine came into being in 1931 when American composer Henry Cowell—in search of a means of translating his increasingly complicated rhythmic pieces—contracted Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical device that bears his name. Theremin came up with the Rhythmicon, “a quirky, clunky, keyboard-based machine that was able to play complex polyrhythms in precise loops,” writes Peter Holslin at the Red Bull Music Academy Daily.
Although only three models of the machine were ever produced—one now lost—and Cowell only wrote a couple of pieces for the machine before losing interest, it remains, as musicologist Margaret Schedel has pointed out, “a conceptual leap” in instrument design and a direct ancestor of today’s rhythm and sequencing technology. The Rhythmicon was the first foray into what Schedel calls “interactivity,” meaning, Holslin writes that “you simply press a key to activate a sequence—much like you can do today with the arpeggiator of a keyboard….” The Rhythmicon used photoelectric technology:
The keys were each connected to a light that turned on when you pressed them. The lights then shined through a sequence of holes punched into two discs that rotated via a motor. On the other side of the discs was a photoelectric sensor that, when activated by the patterns of light, sent the Rhythmicon’s unique signals to a tube amp and thus to a speaker and out to dazzled audiences.
Audiences may have been impressed by the operation, but they were considerably less dazzled by the sound of the thing. One reviewer in 1932 described its range of tones as “a cross between a grunt and a snort” up to “an Indian war whoop.” As the video above shows, the third version of the machine—built by Theremin in the 60s from junk parts—“sounds like it’s making geese calls.”
Other, later rhythm machines were designed specifically to recreate live drums, rather than simply make rhythmic sounds. One notable entry in the history of drum machines is the Chamberlin Rhythmate, a tape loop drum machine designed in 1949 by Harry Chamberlin’s keyboard company. Meant to accompany an organ player, the device consisted of 14 tape loop recordings of real acoustic jazz drum kits, along with percussion instruments like claves, castanets, and bongos. If you’re familiar with the workings of another early electronic instrument—one that caught on in pop music thanks to the Beatles—you’ll recognize the mechanism here as nearly identical to that of the Mellotron. Chamberlin invented that strange, later electronic instrument using the same technology as he had for the Rhythmate.
After the Rhythmate came the Wurlitzer Sideman, designed for the same purpose—to give organists a rhythm section. Created ten years later in 1959, the Sideman is known as the first mass-produced drum machine. (The Rhythmate sold at most 100 models in the sixties.) Its technology recalls that of the Rhythmicon—it uses a series of vacuum tubes that produce a “sequenced” sound as a rotating metal disc makes contact with them. And as you can hear in the demo above, the Sideman hardly seems to be an improvement on Chamberlain’s tape loop machine; though its controls have much more variation, the machine’s operation is also much noisier, in an almost industrial way. We’ve likely all seen variations on this design in old organs from the 60s and 70s, which began to come standard with some form of electro-mechanical drum machine built in.
It would take nearly a decade after the Sideman for the development of drum machines that musicians deemed worthy of using as featured instruments. One such, the Vox Percussion King from 1966, became integral to one of the defining moments in electronic pop, Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (above) from 1974. By the early eighties, the floodgates of drum machine technology had opened, and dozens of commercial models burst onto the scene. But despite all its shortcomings, that very first rhythm machine, the homely Rhythmicon, set modern music on the road to “interactivity,” as Schedel writes, extending “performer’s musical capacities” and “anticipating the interactive computer music movement by several decades.” Yet another reason to remember the genius of Leon Theremin.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
Some Joy for Your Ears: New Orleans Brass Band Plays Life-Affirming Cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”
As the title suggests and the lyrics confirm, Marvin Gaye’s 1982 R&B hit “Sexual Healing” had but one thing on its mind.
The Hot 8 Brass Band, above, brings an added dimension to this—forgive me—seminal song, transforming it into something joyous and life affirming.
They deserve it. In their 20-year career, the band has weathered a staggering array of hardships. Several members have died unexpectedly and way too soon, including 17-year-old trumpet player, Jacob Johnson, executed during a home invasion, and a 22-year-old trombonist, Joseph Williams, who was shot by the New Orleans police officers who stopped him en route to play a church funeral. Another band member lost both of his legs in a horrific accident. The group was displaced by Hurricane Katrina, which damaged their homes, killed one member’s grandmother and brought a halt to paying gigs.
Brass has healing powers too, to a degree that became apparent when the band returned to New Orleans, playing free, spur-of-the-moment shows for Katrina evacuees still stewing in shelters around the city. The media took note, setting off a chain reaction that led to an appearance in Spike Lee’s documentary, When The Levees Broke. Their UK record label, Tru Thoughts, signed them on the strength of their “Sexual Healing” cover.
As Bennie Pete, Hot 8’s band leader and tuba player, told Esquire:
When reality strikes like that you can’t really do nothin’ but be stronger. We got stronger from it. We leaned on each other. The music has been there to help us. You have to rise to the occasion. And then you keep answering questions, being interviewed about it. You gotta keep reliving it. But on the other side, you understand that people who aren’t from New Orleans wanna know what we’re going through, they’re concerned. So it’s our duty, part of our job to be able to suck it up and deal with it, and spread it to the world. It hurts you on the inside to keep on reliving these situations but you owe it to your mates, to get their life stories out there as far as you can.
I experienced some queasiness midway through the video, when the band leaves their sparsely populated outdoor rehearsal area for a more public thoroughfare. I saw plenty of enthusiasm among the gathered crowd, but no black faces outside of the band’s.
Uh…
A little research reveals that the video was shot not in New Orleans (where I have never been), but while the band’s 20th Anniversary tour paused in Brighton (England) where Tru Thoughts is based.
Not wanting to be guilty I checked the census records. In 2011, Brighton was 94.3% white, with the Black and Black British community constituting just 0.8% of the non-white population. And while geographically, it’s not exactly the opposite end of the earth from New Orleans, it is far enough that Pete can claim the video as a metaphor for how far the band has come:
It is a great moment captured, and it also shows as a band we are determined to live out our dreams and fortunate enough to be able to share them with the world; a lot of brass bands, and other musicians for that matter, for some reason or another do not get the opportunity to do so.… And the ultimate to top it off is to be travelling internationally while doing it, you know, being a few black kids from a little town down south in New Orleans, to go from practising our music in a local park to travelling abroad playing sold out shows is a beautiful thing to say the least.
To round off the anniversary celebration, Tru Thoughts recently released an album of “Sexual Healing” Hot 8 remixes. It’s a lovely idea, this tribute, but for me, Hot 8’s position is secure. So for that matter Gaye’s (whose original video is below).
Spotify users can listen to the “Sexual Healing Remixes” for free here.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Free: Download 500+ Rare Music Manuscripts by Mozart, Bach, Chopin & Other Composers from the Morgan Library
When my son first started playing the piano, I lost several evenings chasing the holy grail of free online sheet music. Sadly, most of what we were interested in downloading wasn’t really free… just the first page.
It’s hard to rationalize dropping five bucks on one song, when the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is a short subway ride away. The problem is, I’m not much of a musician, and while there are scores and scores of scores upon their shelves, I rarely understood what it was I was checking out. Often I’d come home with the sought after piece, only to realize that I’d inadvertently checked out a vocal selection, or the chord-rich equivalent of a cocktail pianist’s fake book.
With the Morgan Library’s Music Manuscripts Online project, there’s no guarantee my son or I will be able to play it, but I do know exactly what I’m getting.
The handwritten manuscript of Mozart’s comic singspiel, Der Schauspieldirektor, above, for instance, autographed by the composer himself. 84 pages worth, not counting covers and endpapers, all free for the downloading!
Put that on your iPad, Mr. Salieri!
The collection currently offers digitized versions of upwards of 500 musical manuscripts, with more to come as the reviewing process continues.
It’s searchable by composer, and big names abound.
Perhaps you’d like to warm up the Wurltizer with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue for Organ, BWV 538, in D minor…
Or let all your opera singing, ballet dancing friends know you’re available to accompany them with Puccini’s autographed manuscript for Le Villi…
Or circumnavigate the scribbled out boo boos, while attempting Chopin’s Polonaises, Piano, Op. 26. Chopin’s John Hancock is the reward.
The hits just keep coming: Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Fauré, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann…
Not surprisingly, female composers are grossly underrepresented, but there are a few gems, such as Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel’s autographed manuscript of the song Selmar und Selma, decorated with a pretty pencil and wash drawing by her husband
The Morgan has plans to add essays about the manuscripts by leading scholars. In the meantime, pick a piece and start practicing.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Who’s Out There?: Orson Welles Narrates a Documentary Asking Whether There’s Extraterrestrial Life in the Universe (1975)
Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated humankind for centuries upon centuries; long before the X‑Files popularized the declaration, we’ve wanted to believe. But this curiosity-driven desire goes hand-in-hand with mortal fear: what if intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe, and it decides to come to Earth and exterminate us? Turn-of-the-century sci-fi master H.G. Wells tapped into that emotional current with The War of the Worlds; forty years later, Orson Welles tapped it deeper still with his adaptation of Wells’ novel, “a certain notorious radio broadcast which some of you may remember.”
That’s how Welles puts it from the narrator’s seat of Who’s Out There?, a half-hour television documentary originally broadcast in 1971. “It starts off strong with its Doctor Who-esque credits sequence,” writes io9’s Katharine Trendacosta. “Then Welles talks about becoming friends with H.G. Wells after his infamous War of the Worlds radio play. Then they interview people who had been scared by the broadcast. It gets barely more normal as it goes on. Once Carl Sagan showed up, my head exploded.”
I listened to Welles’ War of the Worlds over and over again on tape as a kid, but by that time it had already passed into the realm of historical artifact. When Who’s Out There? debuted, however, that infamous Halloween broadcast had aired less than 35 years before (Who’s Out There? itself, by comparison, aired 45 years ago), so the fright it caused remained in living memory. Even more recently, David Bowie had capitalized artistically on a new wave of outer-space fascination with “Space Oddity” in 1969 and, more directly, “Life on Mars?” two years later.
“Life on Mars?” acts as more or less the animating question of this documentary, which both examines the then-current evidence for such a phenomenon, on the Red Planet or elsewhere, and ponders why we so often assume that visitors from outer space will come with malevolent intentions. (Welles wonders aloud if it has to do with our having named Mars after the Roman god of war, and I suppose he has a point.) Still, our curiosity hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by ExoMars, the joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency which today launches probes out to search for, yes, life on mars. If whoever’s out there won’t come to us, well then, we’ll just have to go to them.
Find more documentaries in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
via io9
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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.
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