It has become something of a new Irish tradition. For the fourth year running, Bono, Glen Hansard and friends took to the streets of Dublin — to Grafton Street, to be precise — to spread holiday cheer and raise money for charity. Last year, the group performed a rousing version of the Mic Christopher song “Heyday” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” This year, they added “Silent Night” and a rendition of U2’s “Desire” to the mix.
We can remember Lenny Bruce as a masterful social critic or as one of the edgiest, most original comedians of the late-50s/early 60s. Or both, since both sides of him were always present in the live performances preserved on film and tape. Born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Long Island, Bruce came from a showbiz family, in a way; his mother was a performer and a supporter of his stage ambitions. But, after his discharge from the Navy (for a performance in drag, among other things), his New York act evolved quickly from celebrity impressions and burlesque to a more personalized and biting satire that cut through the genteel silences around racism, religious intolerance, drugs, politics, sexuality, and Jewishness in America. Sprinkled liberally with Yiddishisms, hip beat expressions, and topical riffs, Bruce’s jazz-inflected act could swing wildly from giddy falsetto exuberance to heartbreaking downbeat lament in a matter of minutes. Perhaps nowhere is this highwire act better documented than in the recording of his 1961 performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall, which he gave at midnight in a blizzard to a devoted audience of nearly 3,000.
The Carnegie Hall concert marked the height of his career, after which his sad decline began. Later that year, he was arrested in San Francisco for obscenity. He was acquitted, but this began the years-long battle in courts, including two Supreme Court appeals, on similar charges (dramatized in the excellent biopic Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman as Bruce). The legal battles bankrupted Bruce, and exhausted and demoralized him; he stood as a defender of the right to free expression and the need for people like him, whether just “entertainers” or serious satirists, to hold power to account and mock its threadbare contradictions, but he so profoundly rubbed the legal system the wrong way that he didn’t stand a chance.
By 1966, Bruce could not gig outside San Francisco. One of his final performances (above) before his death from overdose sees him rehearsing his legal battles. He is embittered, angry, some might say obsessed, some might say righteous, but he’s still in top form, even if there may be more of Bruce the critic than Bruce the entertainer here. Lenny Bruce has been mourned and celebrated by comedic giants like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Bill Hicks and musicians like Nico, Dylan, and R.E.M. But it sometimes seems that his name gets more press than his work. So, get to know Lenny Bruce. Watch the performance above, but also listen to the brilliant Carnegie Hall concert (available in 7 parts on YouTube). And thank him every time a comic gets away with crossing social boundaries with impunity. He wore the system down so that the Carlins and Pryors could break it wide open.
Josh Jones is a writer and scholar currently completing a dissertation on landscape, literature, and labor.
Jackson Pollock painted with the kind of visceral immediacy that frees you from having to know much about his ideas, his methods, or his life. But spend enough time gazing at his canvases and you’ll surely start to get curious. If you’ve seen Melvyn Bragg talk to Francis Bacon in studio, gallery, café, and bar on the South Bank Show’s profile of the painter, you know how expertly he can open up an artist’s world. Two years after that International Emmy-winning program, the broadcaster, writer, and House of Lords Member applied his talents toa perhaps even less understood painter in Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock. Where Bragg appeared as a participatory presence in The South Bank Show — to the extent, at one drink-sodden point, of getting tipsy himself — here he sticks to narration. His relegation to the soundtrack perhaps reflects a certain cultural distance: to an American, Bragg seems about as English a host as they come, and to the rest of the world, Pollock seems about as American a painter as they come — in his work as well as his life.
The Library Media Project describes Pollock as a “ ‘cowboy’ from Wyoming” instrumental in forging the American art movement, Abstract Expressionism. They describe his life in the smallest nutshell: “His famous ‘drip’ paintings earned him both notoriety and abuse and the pressures of new-found celebrity compounded his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, a fight he lost when he died in a car crash at the age of 44,” In its 50 Bragg-narrated minutes, Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock goes into far greater detail, using existing radio conversations with Pollock, photographer Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock at work, and interviews with critics, curators, Pollock’s colleagues, his friends, his widow, and his mistress. Where a biopic like Ed Harris’ Pollock plunges straight into the artist’s brash conduct and volatile mixture of work and life, this documentary steps slightly back, examining Pollock’s paintings and the Hemingwayesque existence that gave rise to them in a cooler — not to say more English — light. Make them a double feature, if you can.
Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock will be added to the Documentary section of our collection of 500 Free Movies Online.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Give Jim Henson 15 minutes of your time, and the father of the Muppets will teach you how to make your own puppets, using nothing other than household items – socks, potatoes, tacks, tennis balls, rubber bands, wooden spoons, and the rest. This primer originally aired on Iowa Public Television back in 1969, not long before Henson joined a fledgling TV production, Sesame Street, where he helped create the most famous puppets of our generation: Oscar, Ernie, Kermit, Bert, Cookie Monster, Big Bird and the rest. Though recorded 40+ years ago, the advice is simple and timeless. When you’re done watching this old favorite of ours, you can go deeper into Jim Henson’s imaginary world with these varied clips.
The American writer Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Rock Springs) chose to read “The Student’s Wife” by his late friend Raymond Carver. The story was first published in America in 1976, in Carver’s debut short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. It exemplifies Carver’s direct, economical style. But don’t make the mistake of calling Carver a “minimalist” around Ford. He describes the story, and the richness of Carver’s writing, in TheGuardian:
Its verbal resources are spare, direct, rarely polysyllabic, restrained, intense, never melodramatic, and real-sounding while being obviously literary in intent. (You always know, pleasurably, that you’re reading a made short story.) These affecting qualities led some dunderheads to call his stories “minimalist”, which they are most assuredly not, inasmuch as they’re full-to-the-brim with the stuff of human intimacy, of longing, of barely unearthable humour, of exquisite nuance, of pathos, of unlooked-for dred, and often of love–expressed in words and gestures not frequently associated with love. More than they are minimal, they are replete with the renewings and the fresh awarenesses we go to great literature to find.
It’s over 20 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes and, for better or worse, inaugurated the grunge era. The video arrived as a shock and a thrill to a generation too young to remember punk and sick of the steady stream of cheesy corporate dance music and hair metal that characterized the late-80s. For everyone outside the small Seattle scene that nurtured them and the tape-trading kids in the know, the band seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a total angst-ridden package, and the MTV video, by first-time director Samuel Bayer, seemed bracingly anarchic and raw at the time.
But a look at the first live performance of “Teen Spirit” (above) makes it seem pretty tame by comparison. The video’s a little grainy and low-res, which suits the song just fine. Live, “Teen Spirit’s” disturbing undertones are more pronounced, its quiet-loud dynamics more forceful, and the energy of the crowd is real, not the thrashing around of a bunch of teenage extras. Not a cheerleader in sight, but I think this would have grabbed me more than the pep rally-riot-themed MTV video did when it debuted a few months later. Despite their anti-corporate stance, Nirvana was a casualty of their own success, eaten up by the machinery they despised. Their best moments are still the unscripted and unpredictable. For contrast, zip back to 1991 and watch the MTV video below. Also don’t miss Nirvana’s Home Videos: An Intimate Look at the Band’s Life Away From the Spotlight (1988).
Josh Jones is a writer and scholar currently completing a dissertation on landscape, literature, and labor. This video makes him feel old.
Though far from the most astute scholar of physics or zombie cinema, I have to believe that this marks the first time physicists have made a contribution to the field. But perhaps only they would think to set their movie inside the Large Hadron Collider, the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s particle accelerator of record-setting size and power. (Hands up if you even knew one could go inside it.) The device has received much press for its potential to either prove or disprove the existence of a predicted elementary particle called the Higgs boson, and Decay speculates about one particular consequence of this high-profile scientific quest: what if the Higgs boson turns people into zombies? Doing his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, writer-director Luke Thompson realized that — and here I quote the press release — “the tunnels under CERN would be ideal for a zombie film.” £2000, a couple borrowed cameras, and a great deal of scavenged props and improvised filmmaking gear later, we can watch the whole thing free online.
Thompson’s entry into the zombie canon follows “a small group of students (played by physicists) after a disastrous malfunction in the world’s biggest particle accelerator. As they try desperately to escape from the underground maintenance tunnels, they are hunted by the remains of a maintenance team, who have become less than human.” This use of actual young physicists running around the actual nooks and crannies of CERN lends the project a scrappy realism, and the practice of making do with any resource at hand has a proud history in zombie filmmaking. Recall that George A. Romero, shooting the genre-defining Night of the Living Dead (also free to watch on the internet), could only raise $6,000 at a time, which forced him to find horror wherever he could.Like every strong zombie picture, Decay not only operates on meager resources but performs a certain social satire as well, in this case to do with how the nonscientific world perceives science. But no need to take it too seriously: “This film has not been authorized or endorsed by CERN,” reads the first title card. “It is purely a work of fiction.” Whew.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 375 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle –Nook) beforehand.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gagdets, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 600 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines — history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 500 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2013 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device.…
It is, arguably, the most beautiful version of the most popular holiday tune: Nat King Cole singing “The Christmas Song” in his velvety-smooth baritone voice. Cole actually recorded the song four times between 1946 and 1961, but it’s the last recording that is most often played on the radio and in stores during the holiday season.
“The Christmas Song” was written on a sweltering summer day in southern California by the crooner Mel Tormé and his writing partner, Robert Wells. Tormé and Wells had been hired to write a pair of movie scores. Complaining about the heat one day, the two men began talking about winter at higher latitudes. Wells jotted down a few mental images. “I saw a spiral pad on his piano with four lines written in pencil, “writes Tormé in his autobiography It Wasn’t All Velvet. “They started, ‘Chestnuts roasting … Jack Frost nipping … Yuletide carols … Folks dressed up like Eskimos.’ Bob didn’t think he was writing a song lyric. He said he thought if he could immerse himself in winter, he could cool off.”
When the song was completed, Tormé immediately thought of his friend Cole, according to Ace Collins in his book Stories Behind the Greatest Hits of Christmas. The two songwriters drove to Cole’s house in Los Angeles and played it for him. Cole liked the song, and asked the writers to hold it for him while he made arrangements to record it. Cole first recorded “The Christmas Song” with his jazz trio in New York on June 14, 1946. Later arrangements included strings and grew progressively more lush. The scene above is from the very last episode of The Nat King Cole Show, broadcast live on December 17, 1957. Cole is accompanied by Nelson Riddle and his orchestra.
For those celebrating today, we can think of no better way to send you our greetings than with this moving performance, which ends with the memorable lines:
And so I’m offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it’s been said many times
Many ways, Merry Christmas to you
Bystanders roll their eyes and hustle past, but only one young woman attempts to engage him directly, smiling as if she knows that Jones’ is the sort of shell game you can’t win.
That is until one man breaks into a spontaneous rendition of All You Need Is Love, the lyrics pulled up on his smartphone. Was this brave performance motivated in part by the presence of a film crew? Who cares, as random pedestrians and staffers from the nearby TKTS booth join in, providing a fine alternative soundtrack to the hate spewing from the bull pulpit. In Ewing and Grady’s edit, the Beatles are a force strong enough to drown him out.
Today we say merry Christmas the Open Culture way, by bringing in a piece of work from the late Maurice Sendak, the children’s author and illustrator who with everything he wrote and drew evaded the limitations of that label. Though most of us remember his books Where the Wild Things Areand In the Night Kitchenfrom childhood, whenever our childhoods happened to be, fewer of us have seen his animated work. Above you’ll find a bit of it relevant to this time of year: Sendak’s opening sequence for Simple Gifts. In it we witness a shoeless waif’s metamorphosis into a Christmas tree which attracts and comforts a pair of similarly dispossessed tots. The 1977 anthology film collected six short films, all on the theme of Christmas. But only this first minute and a half comes from the inimitable mind belonging to the man Time called “the Picasso of children’s books.” The video then features Simple Gifts’ opening remarks from Colleen Dewhurst, who reflects on and draws a lesson from this brief animated tale: “A person gives nothing who does not give of himself.”
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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