Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater Animated

in Art | February 15th, 2010

Falling­wa­ter was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. Con­struc­tion began a year lat­er and was even­tu­al­ly com­plet­ed in 1939. Many con­sid­er Falling­wa­ter one of Wright’s finest cre­ations. Hence why Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine count­ed it as one of the 28 Places to See Before You Die. Now, thanks to the mini movie above, you can watch the build­ing of Falling­wa­ter take place right before your eyes, and then take a tour of the house. It’s all done in com­put­er graph­ics and runs 4+ min­utes. And, as one read­er tells us, the “video is as real as it gets.” You can learn more about the film and the house at this web site. Thanks Mike for the great tip.

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Validation, or The Magic of Free Parking

in Comedy, Film | February 15th, 2010

Kurt Kuen­ne’s short film, “Val­i­da­tion,” has played at 34 film fes­ti­vals and won 17 awards. This 16 minute indie offers a “fable about the mag­ic of free park­ing” — mean­ing they’re talk­ing about “val­i­da­tion” in a larg­er sense than park­ing per se … We’ve added the clip to our YouTube favorites.

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Django at 100

in Music | February 14th, 2010

Djan­go Rein­hardt, one of Europe’s finest jazz gui­tar play­ers, would have turned 100 on Jan­u­ary 24. It’s fair­ly aston­ish­ing to think that he mas­tered the gui­tar as he did, ele­vat­ing it to a lead jazz instru­ment, despite being self taught, and hav­ing lost the use of two fin­gers in a fire. (More on that in the LA Times.) Above, we fea­ture Djan­go and his group, Quin­tette du Hot Club de France, per­form­ing “J’At­tendrai” (I Will Wait) in 1939. As you’ll note, he only has two fin­gers mov­ing on the frets.

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Notre Dame Marching Band Performs “This Too Shall Pass”

in Music | February 14th, 2010

The Notre Dame March­ing Band hit the field (a real field), where they per­formed OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass.” The per­for­mance was arranged by Notre Dame’s direc­tor of bands, Dr. Ken Dye. And it was all record­ed live on the spot. You can watch the video in a larg­er for­mat here. Inci­den­tal­ly, if you’re not famil­iar with OK Go’s music, you can watch them per­form an acoustic ver­sion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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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Tweets of the Week (2/13)

in Twitter | February 13th, 2010

Why let good tweets (and re-tweets) go to waste? Each week, we’re going to list some of the cul­tur­al good­ies that appeared in our Twit­ter stream. You can start fol­low­ing Open Cul­ture on Twit­ter here.

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Picasso Painting on Glass

in Art | February 12th, 2010

A deeply mem­o­rable scene. Picas­so at his home in Val­lau­ris, paint­ing on glass with a cam­era rolling on the oth­er side. The scene is an out­take from Vis­ite à Picas­so (A Vis­it with Picas­so), a 1950 film by Bel­gian film­mak­er Paul Hae­saerts. The full film, run­ning 20 min­utes, can be watched in its entire­ty on Vimeo (or right below). You can find this film in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online. For good mea­sure, we have also added an excerpt from the 1956 film Le Mys­tere Picas­so, by Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot, oth­er­wise known for Les dia­boliques (1955). The film is avail­able on YouTube in two parts: Part 1 — Part 2.

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Hyperspace to Berlin, Watch Metropolis Live

in Uncategorized | February 12th, 2010

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Restored ‘Metropolis’ to Stream Live on Friday

in Film | February 11th, 2010

Clas­sic film buffs take note. Roger Ebert writes:

The eager­ly await­ed restored ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s silent clas­sic “Metrop­o­lis” will steam live on the inter­net on Fri­day Feb. 12. In Amer­i­ca, it can be see in the after­noon. It’s said that near­ly an hour of footage, long thought to be lost, has been added. The footage was dis­cov­ered in a film archive in Buenos Aires.… It will be streamed via web­sites in both Ger­man and France. The actu­al film is sched­uled to start play­ing at 1:40 PM CST, Chica­go time.”

The French site stream­ing the film can be found here, and the Ger­man site here.

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A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

in Art, Comedy, History | February 11th, 2010

This imag­i­na­tive bit was a stu­den­t’s final project for an art course. The flip­book, made entire­ly out of biro pens, was cre­at­ed with 2100 pages of draw­ings and took about 3 weeks to devel­op. Need­less to say, the stu­dent got an A.

Thanks to @kirstinbutler for flag­ging this one.

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10,000 Galaxies in 3D

in Science | February 10th, 2010

In 2004, the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope cap­tured 10,000 galax­ies in an image that’s now called the Ultra Deep Field. It’s our deep­est look into the uni­verse. The video above ani­mates the Deep Field image and puts it into 3D. No need to read more. Just watch.

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Why You Share

in Life, Media, Psychology | February 10th, 2010

A team of researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia spent a good six months study­ing The New York Times list of most-e-mailed arti­cles, hop­ing to fig­ure out what arti­cles get shared, and why. And here’s what they essen­tial­ly found:

Peo­ple pre­ferred e‑mailing arti­cles with pos­i­tive rather than neg­a­tive themes, and they liked to send long arti­cles on intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­leng­ing top­ics… Per­haps most of all, read­ers want­ed to share arti­cles that inspired awe, an emo­tion that the researchers inves­ti­gat­ed after notic­ing how many sci­ence arti­cles made the list.

This goes a long way toward explain­ing why 3.4 mil­lion peo­ple have watched The Known Uni­verse since mid Decem­ber. And, as Bill Rankin right­ly sug­gest­ed to me, it says some­thing good about online cul­ture, and what makes Open Cul­ture work as a site. Each day, we try to give you a lit­tle awe and chal­lenge. And for our next post: 10,000 Galax­ies in 3D.

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