Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist who played alongside Bruce Springsteen for four decades, passed away today at 69. The Big Man and his sound will be missed.
Above, a simple mournful reminder of what we’ll be going without: First up, a soulful solo from “Jungleland,” performed in Milwaukee back in March 2008. And then a return to the early days, a youthful performance of “Thunder Road” recorded at the Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ (1978). Clarence takes over at the 6:12 mark.
It’s hard to do cinematic justice to any good novel, let alone the greatest of Russia’s many great novels, Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace. But Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk somehow managed to pull it off. Reviewing Bondarchuk’s film back in 1969, a young Roger Ebert wrote:
“War and Peace” is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and — yes — splendid movie. Perhaps that’s just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph.
No corners were cut, and no expenses spared, in making the film. Indeed, the film (available on DVD here) was made “at a cost of $100,000,000, with a cast of 120,000, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to recreate Napoleon’s battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened.” What’s more, 35,000 costumes were made for the production, and many Soviet museums contributed artifacts for the production design. That’s staggering, even by today’s standards.
Released in four parts between 1965 and 1967, the Academy Award-winning film runs more than seven hours and you can now find it playing on YouTube. You can watch Part 1 here, and here you have Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. And if you need subtitles, click CC at the bottom of the videos. The film is, of course, listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Arkansas-born artist Shea Hembrey kicks off his TED talk by confessing to a hick childhood in which he and his sister “would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.” That modest joke sets the stage for his introduction of Seek, a project Hembrey conceived in response to his disappointment with several exhibits of contemporary art in Europe, including the Venice Biennale. Finding much of the work he encountered too obtuse and inaccessible, Hembrey decided to create an international biennial of his own, featuring the 100 most inspiring artists he could find.
The twist, of course, is that all 100 artists (and artworks) were created by Hembrey himself, in strict accordance with two personal criteria: First, the work must be something he could explain to his grandma in less than five minutes; next, its process must engage the three “H’s” of head, heart, and hand.
All 100 pieces feature distinct materials, character and craft, and taken together they provide an impressive showcase for Hembrey’s humor and virtuosity. But that grandma of his had better be hiding a degree in semiotics, or at least an old copy of the The Postmodern Condition, because the success of Seek’s joke is largely dependent on our knowledge of the world it lampoons. And for all the determined folksiness of his manifesto, the position Hembrey stakes out — somewhere between parody and homage — would not be unfamiliar to the curators of the Venice Biennale.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
What do you get for the father who has everything? How about a healthy dose of canonical resentment, in the form of Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, read by Plath herself, from our list of Cultural Icons?
Or, if you’d prefer something that says “I love you” with a little less rancor, you might want to go with a video that’s guaranteed to make him smile.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney personally engineered a loophole in the U.S. energy bill exempting companies that use an oil- and gas-drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result, tons of diesel fuel and assorted chemicals–some of them toxic, like benzyne–are injected at high pressure into the earth at the sole discretion of the companies doing the injecting. One of the chief beneficiaries of Cheney’s string-pulling is the company that invented the procedure, Halliburton, which employed Cheney as chairman and CEO just prior to his becoming vice president. (A coincidence?)
In the wake of the Halliburton Loophole, as it has come to be known, there have been a growing number of water pollution cases, from Pennsylvania to Colorado, associated with fracking. Some of those cases were documented in last year’s Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary, Gasland, by Josh Fox, who said in a PBS interview, “I could take a car battery and throw it in the watershed and go to federal prison, but these guys can take the same chemicals and inject it by the thousands of gallons, and they’re exempt. It makes no sense.”
It’s a serious issue involving two of America’s vital interests–the need for energy and the need for safe drinking water–but a group of journalism students in New York University’s Studio 20 master’s program, in association with the public-interest journalism group ProPublica, has taken a light-hearted approach, creating a music video to raise awareness of fracking. It’s called “My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song).” The purpose of the project, according to group leader David Holmes, is to encourage people to read ProPublica’s reporting on the issue. “We were concerned with building a better entryway into that investigation,” Holmes told Poynter.org, “and we figured a song would be the perfect way to do it–especially since it’s called fracking.”
If you were stuck somewhere far away from yesterday’s lunar eclipse, here’s some consolation courtesy of NASA. The Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center has compiled this two and a half minute video from over a year’s worth of data recorded by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been orbiting the moon at 50 kilometers above its surface for over a year.
The results are pretty spectacular, and might render the pain of missing a chance to watch the moon turn red a little more bearable, especially for all you heartbroken Cancers (we’ll get through this.)
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
The New York Times has posted A.O. Scott’s 3‑minute look back at the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou. Scott describes the surrealist classic, a collaboration between painter Salvador Dalí and a very young first-time filmmaker Luis Buñuel, as an “old dog with an endless supply of new tricks.” The short’s procession of seemingly absurd, unconnected images, he adds, does not follow the logic of narrative but rather the “logic of dreams.”
Even though its most famous (or infamous) images — a severed hand, a hand covered with ants, and most finally a hand slicing into a woman’s eyeball with a razor blade — seem less shocking now than they did 80 years ago, Un Chien Andalou is still a pleasure. Our reality has changed since the 20s. Our dreams, less so.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou in its entirety, along with L’Âge d’Or, another Buñuel/Dalí production, in our collection of Free Online Movies. But proceed with caution: About 25 years ago, I slipped a copy into the family VCR, expecting a cute cartoon about an Andalusian dog. I’m still recovering.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Several weeks back, Go the F**k to Sleep, the irreverent new children’s book, gained national attention when pirated PDF copies went viral on the internet. But don’t feel sorry for the author and illustrator. The book is now #1 on the Amazon bestseller list; Samuel Jackson has narrated the official audio book (you can probably snag a free copy through this Audible.com deal); and Werner Herzog delighted fans when he read the (not safe for work) bookat the New York Public Library book party held earlier this week. And, yes, this is the real Werner Herzog — not the impersonator who passed around popular readings of Curious Georgeand Twas the Night Before Christmas on YouTube …
A new way to see the world. Give NASA seven minutes, and they’ll show you the Earth’s most impressive landscapes — as seen from space, in HD. The coasts of Namibia, Tunisia and Madagascar, they’re all on the itinerary, along with Sicily, China, Iran, and Utah. Plus you will see a giant hurricane over the Atlantic ocean. Not to be missed.
Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, burst onto the digital scene with The Mother of All Funk Chords in 2009. Now he has resurfaced with a new video. This time, it’s a musical journey through Jerusalem, a mashup that weaves together the sounds of local musicians, creating a visual/aural composition that lets you tap into the unique sound of a city that lives partly in the past, partly in the future, always wavering between optimism and despair.…
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