Look at what Neels Castillon unexpectedly captured on film while doing some shooting at a Marseille airport. Birds doing a pretty incredible ballet in the sky. If you enjoy watching murmurations, you’ll want to watch this other footage shot in Rome and especially this breathtaking (no hyperbole here) clip from Ireland. It’s all quite stunning.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.
Think of Masterpiece Theater and you might think of Downton Abbey, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, or even the Cookie Monster. But the man who really made the series famous was broadcaster Alistair Cooke, the series’ crisp, avuncular host. Seated in a leather chair, surrounded by bound volumes, Cooke introduced all of the great British programming brought to the States by WGBH—I, Claudius and Upstairs, Downstairs and The Six Wives of Henry VIII—and brought a cozy gravitas to American television.
Cooke died in 2004 and left a legacy as a broadcast essayist: Letter from America, a series of 15-minute radio pieces now collected into an extensive digital archive by BBC Radio 4. The essays aired weekly throughout the world for 58 years, beginning in 1946, sending Cooke’s slightly amused voice over the airwaves. He gave us his ex-pat take on everything from American holidays (including his personal involvement in making George Washington’s birthday a national holiday), to the ways American English varies from British English, to major events in American history.
Cooke captured America’s grief after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but his eyewitness account of Bobby Kennedy’s death would become one of his most powerful reports. Cooke was in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy was shot and used scratch paper to scribble down his impressions of the chaos.
He was brilliant at crafting character-driven stories about issues. His piece about John Lennon’s death (above) segued neatly into an exploration of gun violence in America. He reported on the suicide of actress Jean Seberg and used the obituary as an opportunity to discuss the excesses of FBI surveillance and witch-hunting.
Cooke wasn’t as good a writer as he was a reporter (view his original scripts in the Boston University archive) and he audibly sighs during some broadcasts, as if he is either tired or bored. But his point of view is priceless: an observant, charming outsider who fell in love with his adopted country, warts and all.
Related Content
Monsterpiece Theater Presents Waiting for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beckett
Watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Appearances on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 72
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at .
“Currently, it seems, Jane Austen is hotter than Quentin Tarantino.” Martin Amis wrote this in the New Yorker back in 1996, when Tarantino had cultural heat to spare. Even today, as the filmmaker rides high on another one of his periodic waves of pop-cultural exuberance and controversy-courting violence, Austen may still win the popularity contest. Her much-read, often-adapted second novel Pride and Prejudice has, in fact, just passed its 200th anniversary of publication, and its reputation as a reliably sharp and engaging comedy seems stronger than ever.
Especially striking for a novel of its age, this reputation appears to have also grown wider than ever. Though some have always dismissed her — and will always dismiss her — as a writer of mere romantic fiction meant solely for women, admiration for Austen knows no demographic boundaries. Just look at her high-profile living male enthusiasts, a group that ranges from Amis to venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham, who names Austen as one of his heroes. “In her novels I can’t see the gears at work,” Graham writes. “Though I’d really like to know how she does what she does, I can’t figure it out, because she’s so good that her stories don’t seem made up.”
“When I was introduced to the novel, at the age of fourteen,” Amis writes of Pride and Prejudice, “I read twenty pages and then besieged my stepmother’s study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything. Pride and Prejudice suckers you. Amazingly — and, I believe, uniquely — it goes on suckering you.” And if that 200-year-old novel fails to sucker you, perhaps its 202-year-old predecessor Sense and Sensibility or its 199-year-old successor Mansfield Park will. You can browse Austen’s hand-written manuscripts pertaining to these and other of her novels in Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, an online joint project from the University of Oxford and King’s College London. Austen’s fanbase, perhaps because of its broadness, seems to contain relatively few obsessive exegetes (compared to, say, acolytes of Thomas Pynchon), but you can only read her six novels so many times before feeling a need, if a vain one, to glimpse those “gears at work.” And if this contact with Austen’s creative spirit moves you to write your own adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, why not think outside the box and check on Tarantino’s availability to direct?
Copies of Pride and Prejudice can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
You can also download free audio versions of Jane Austen novels if you take part in the free trial programs offered by Audible.com and FreeAudioBooks.com.
Related content:
Dominic West (aka Jimmy McNulty) Reads Jane Austen
Nietzsche, Melville, Jane Austen & More: The Latest Audio Book Classics Released by Librivox
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
There are always those bands that you’d wish you’d seen live—bands that seem like they’ll go on forever (maybe so long you wish they’d quit already). But then you never get around to it, and, Bam!, one day the chance is lost. One of those bands for me is R.E.M., the only U.S. band in my book whose early work stood up to almost everything The Smiths put out. Since I was such a young lad when I first heard them circa-Document, it wasn’t easy for me to get out to concerts. And by the time I was old enough, they’d moved on some from their early jangle and stomp, garage-rock, post-punk sound, and I’d moved on to other favorites. That’s a shame, in hindsight, but now thanks to the heavenly magic (or devilry) of YouTube, I can (and do) spend hours catching up on concert film of bands like R.E.M. that I was born too late to see live in their prime.
Whether or not you had the privilege of seeing Michael Stipe and company in person, there’s little chance that you were at the show above (if so, speak up!). It’s probably one of their first, at the 688 Club in Atlanta, opening for Tex-Mex “Nuevo wavo” guitarist, Joe “King” Carrasco.
This gig took place on either February 2oth or 21st, 1981, a full eighteen months before their debut release, the EP Chronic Town. There are a few tunes here that never resurfaced in later recordings (“Narrator,” “Dangerous Times”) and a couple that became classics (“Gardening at Night,” “Radio Free Europe”). The film opens with them in the midst of covering the Sonny West-penned 1950’s classic “Rave On” (one of Buddy Holly’s last hits). And of course it makes perfect sense that they would owe a debt to this sound, but they transformed it so completely in their original songwriting that it isn’t always evident. They pull it off with panache.
The whole gig is a testament to what a together band they were even at this early stage. It’s all there—Stipe’s vocal quirks and full-body dance attacks, Mike Mills’ bouncing bass lines and angelic vocal harmonies, Peter Buck’s right-handed Rickenbacker arpeggios (and dapper vest), and drummer Bill Berry’s ever-reliable backbeat. Never known as overly technical musicians (an overrated quality in rock, in my opinion), what R.E.M. may have lacked in virtuosity, they made up for in personality. Another complete concert film below, from October 10th, 1982, shows them on a high, two months after Chronic Town’s release. Filmed at the Raleigh Underground, this gig included a number of songs that would appear on their first full-length, the moody, confident, and timeless Murmur.
Related Content
R.E.M.’s Final Live Moments in Mexico (and a Vintage Early Concert)
R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale
Live in Rome, 1980: The Talking Heads Concert Film You Haven’t Seen
Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
edX announced today what looks like a promising new open course — Introduction to Biology: The Secret of Life. Hosted by professor Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, this course will give students a grounding in “topics taught in the MIT introductory biology courses and many biology courses across the world.” The course will cover everything from the basics of DNA to the intricacies of genomics. And it won’t run you any money. But it will require some time — about 6–8 hours per week, across 12 weeks (March 5 — May 28). Plus here’s a nice perk: any student who earns a passing grade will receive “a certificate of mastery,” also free of charge. You can enroll in the course right here.
We have added Introduction to Biology: The Secret of Life to our ever-growing list of MOOCs/Free Certificate Courses, along with another primo edx course, a MOOC version of Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?. Be sure to check it out.
Today we bring you one of the best-loved poems of W.H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” read (below) by the poet himself. Auden wrote the poem in 1937 and first published it in his 1940 volume, Another Time. The poem is a variant of the ballad form, made up of 15 rhymed quatrains. It’s a meditation on love and the remorselessness of time, told in three voices: the narrator, a rapturous lover, and the reproachful clocks that speak back to the lover.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time
Auden made a number of audio recordings over the years, and we were unable to track down the time and place of this one. It may be a 1953 recording originally released by Caedmon Records. “As I Walked Out One Evening” is included in the Random House audio collection, Voice of the Poet: W.H. Auden.
Related Content:
500 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
375 Free eBooks: Download to Kindle, iPad/iPhone & Nook
Jon Stewart and company can make pretty much anyone look like an imbecile. Some nights they have to put a lot of elbow grease into it. Some nights less. And, some nights, they can just leave the elbow grease on the workroom shelf. Like Monday night, when Kingsley Browne, law professor at Wayne State, gave an interview to The Daily Show and opined on whether women should take part in frontline combat. While some conservatives have opposed widening women’s role in combat by pointing to “anatomical facts,” Kingsley pulled some pop psycho-biology out of his dusty storehouse of patrician knowledge. “Girls become women by getting older; boys become men by accomplishing something, by proving something.” Samantha Bee could have just stayed home and collected a paycheck that night. 1950s prattle just sounds increasingly foolish and funny in 2013 (even if its effects are still pernicious). But, even so, Bee did add the Andy Griffith fade-to-black & white, and that was a pretty nice touch.
Note: If Mr. Browne feels like his views weren’t adequately expressed on The Daily Show, we would welcome him to elaborate on his views in the comments section below.
Also note, if you’re looking for more musty musings from the living museum, you can catch Mr. Browne on CNN.
Preppers, it’s almost the big day you’ve been waiting for — the apocalypse and armageddon all rolled into one. Almost, but not quite. According to NASA, “an asteroid about half the size of a football field will fly past Earth only 17,200 miles above our planet’s surface.” “This [will be] a record-setting close approach,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at The Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, we’ve never seen an object this big get so close to Earth.” It’ll be a close call and that’s all. So, preppers, keep your compasses, iodine pills and dehydrated lentils packed and ready for another day. You’ll get your chance.
I once heard a radio broadcast about a lady who watches The Godfather every single day. Impressive as that may sound, it probably doesn’t even count among the top hundred acts of cinematic faith performed in the name of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 Mario Puzo adaptation, featuring Marlon Brando. Though I myself more often go to the well of Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam-themed Joseph Conrad adaptation, featuring Marlon Brando, I understand why Godfather fans obsess. Roger Ebert, of course, understands even better. His “Great Movies” piece on the picture describes it as “a brilliant conjuring act, inviting us to consider the Mafia entirely on its own terms,” with a “subtly constructed” script that “follows no formulas except for the classic structure in which power passes between the generations,” populated by “remarkable faces” and captured with “rich, atmospheric, expressive” cinematography (by Gordon Willis), “celebrated for its darkness.” These qualities all do their part to make us hold up The Godfather as a paragon of American cinema, but lovers of American cinema tend to value one craft above all: acting. How, then, did Coppola and his collaborators arrange for such unforgettable performances?
These clips about the casting of The Godfather shed light on the process. Many of us grew familiar with what Ebert calls Brando’s “justly famous and often imitated” portrayal of Don Vito Corleone through cultural osmosis alone, before we’d ever seen the movie. At the top of the post, you can hear Coppola and James Caan talk about what a hard time studio executives had accepting Brando in the first place. “Every time [Coppola] mentioned Brando’s name,” Caan remembers, “one of the executives said, ‘If you mention his name again, you’re out!’ ” Coppola quotes the president of Paramount Pictures as simply declaring that “Marlon Brando will never appear in this motion picture,” but when the filmmaker pressed them, they offered a deal: “If he does a screen test and puts up a bond guaranteeing that none of his shenanigans will cause a delay, you can consider him.” It was in this screen test that Brando came up with the iconic bulldog-like look and manner of the all-powerful Sicilian paterfamilias. But that alone didn’t guarantee the film’s ascent into greatness; other cast members, like Caan and Al Pacino, also had to fall into place. Neither were yet box office-friendly stars, nor was Robert de Niro, who also auditioned. In the end, it all came together. Rotten Tomatoes summed up the critical consensus as follows: “The Godfather gets everything right.”
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
James Taylor Sings James Taylor, a BBC broadcast from November 1970, appears above. Though the nearly 40-minute solo performance showcases a player who has developed and mastered his distinctive musical persona, it also showcases one who has only reached a mere 22 years of age. But don’t let his aw-shucks youthfulness fool you; by this point, Taylor had already endured a lifetime’s worth of formative troubles. He’d fallen into deep depression while still in high school, spent nine months in a psychiatric hospital, taken up and quit heroin, bottomed out and spent six months in recovery, underwent vocal cord surgery, taken up methedrine, gone into methadone treatment, had an album flop, and broken his hands and feet in a motorcycle wreck. Fire and rain indeed. But he’d also found favor with the Beatles, becoming the first American signed on their Apple label and recruiting Paul McCartney and George Harrison to play on his “Carolina in My Mind.” At the end of the sixties, the world at large didn’t know the name James Taylor, but his fellow musicians knew it soon would.
“I just heard his voice and his guitar,” said McCartney, “and I thought he was great.” Earlier in 1970, many listeners surely felt the same thing after dropping the needle onto Taylor’s breakthrough second album Sweet Baby James. By the time James Taylor Sings James Taylor went to air, he’d accrued enough of an international reputation to guarantee appreciation from even non-Beatles on the other side of the pond. Knowing his audience, Taylor opens with a rendition of Lennon and McCartney’s “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The Beatles connections don’t stop there: Songfacts reports that Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves,” the first single from his pre-Sweet Baby James Apple debut, may have inspired George Harrison to write “Something.” What’s more, Taylor had originally titled his song “I Feel Fine,” before realizing that the Beatles had recorded a song by that name. Though more troubled times lay ahead for the humble (if already well on his way to wealth and fame) young singer-songwriter, this production captures Taylor just before superstardom kicked in.
Related content
James Taylor Gives Free Acoustic Guitar Lessons Online
‘The Needle and the Damage Done’: Neil Young Plays Two Songs on The Johnny Cash Show, 1971
Joni Mitchell: Singer, Songwriter, Artist, Smoking Grandma
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Andy Kaufman had too much personality for one person, so he split himself into several, and nobody seemed to know which one of them was Andy Kaufman. Andy Kaufman probably could have faked his death, then returned for the big ta-da twenty years later, but he didn’t (probably). Andy Kaufman, ladies and gentlemen, was a genius. I don’t mean that in the idiomatic sense of “he was really great,” no. I mean that he had a comic IQ of several hundred points. Which is why so many of his bits are so baffling and rib-crackingly funny at once: he played dolts, simpletons, and drooling, almost catatonic idiots so perfectly that you might swear that there was really something wrong with him. Except that during a performance, you might also swear you’d caught a wicked glint in his eye—for fraction of a second—as if you’d almost, maybe, but not quite seen a subliminal ad flash over the screen during a movie.
Then there were the Kaufman characters so unlikeable, so ruthlessly obnoxious and dangerously unhinged, you’d swear that there was something wrong with him, again. And maybe there was, but I’m convinced he was in full control of it. In the clip above, from The David Letterman Show in 1980, Kaufman sends Letterman into a fit of stammering “uh, oh… ums” and the audience into fits of laughter by looking like he’s just stumbled in from a psych ward and isn’t sure exactly where he is or why. When he finally opens his mouth to speak, at nearly two minutes into the interview, he seems lost, dazed, almost childlike. Which everyone thinks is hilarious, because, well, it’s Andy Kaufman. It must be performance art, right? No matter which Andy Kaufman appeared before an audience, they always had the sense there was another one, or several, underneath, whether they knew his act or not. But you could never know if you’d hit bedrock. Joaquin Phoenix—whose attempts to stunt the public a few years ago mostly provoked befuddlement and pity—never came close to this level of weird. If Charlie Sheen had been hoaxing, instead of just losing his mind… maybe.
One might say Andy Kaufman invented trolling, the art of riling people up by impersonating idiots, crazies, and abrasive jerks. And he got away with it for one simple reason; he was authentic—all of his characters had some kind of endearing vulnerability, even at their most deranged. This was certainly the case with the TV character that made him famous, Taxi’s Latka, an immigrant driver of indeterminate origin, whose naïve demeanor and unintelligible language never smacked of mere, broad parody of “the foreigner,” although in anyone else’s hands, that would have happened. But Kaufman brought to the character a subtlety that made Latka an instant individual. Watch the scene below, for example, in which Kaufman, as Latka, transforms into a swinging Playboy magazine aficionado, then back to Latka, all in under two minutes of Charlie Chaplin-worthy physical comedy.
Latka grew out of an earlier persona of Kaufman’s who claimed to be from a fictional island in the Caspian Sea called “Caspiar.” This character’s nervous ineptitude was charming enough, but the payoff, as you’ll see below, was when Kaufman broke out of character into his swaggering Elvis impersonation. It’s said that the real Elvis loved it, and it’s the bit that inspired the immortal lines in R.E.M.’s Kaufman tribute song, “Man on the Moon”: “Andy are you goofing on Elvis (hey baby) / Are you having fun?” Below, see Kaufman’s transformation into Elvis from an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1977. Tell me if you think he’s enjoying himself.
The darker side of Andy Kaufman comes out in such abusive characters as vitriolic lounge singer, Tony Clifton, sometimes played by Kaufman’s friend and partner, Bob Zmuda (watch Kaufman and Zmuda together on a kids show called Bananaz in 1979). Tony Clifton became Kaufman’s evil alter-ego, an alibi for his more destructive urges, and a character that outlived him, resurrected after his death by Zmuda, and later by comedian Ben Isaac. Below, see Kaufman’s first performance as Clifton in 1977.
Clifton, and Kaufman, got meaner and weirder over the years (or so it seemed). Anyone who’s seen Milos Forman’s biopic Man on the Moon is familiar with Kaufman’s obsessive pranking of professional wrestling: his feud with wrestler Jerry Lawler (who was in on the joke), his relentless taunting of the Southern Lawler and the mostly Southern audience as rednecks and rubes, and his turns in the ring with female wrestlers. This part of his career is truly bizarre, though surely no less a controlled demolition than anything he’d done before. And the weirder Kaufman got, the more he seemed to confirm something many people had always suspected. Whatever the stunt, the character, or impression, the joke was on everyone, and nobody knew what was happening but Andy. In 1989, five years after Kaufman’s death from cancer, his girlfriend Lynne Margulies and friend Joe Orr finished a documentary about his adventures in professional wrestling called I’m from Hollywood, after one of his sneering, faux-elitist insults of Lawler. It’s the last piece of Kaufman’s legacy, and it’s available in several parts on YouTube. Watch and try to imagine, if you can, what the wrestling fans ringside made of Andy Kaufman.
Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
©2006-2025 Open Culture, LLC.
All rights reserved.
