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.
In 1977, just a short month before Bing Crosby died, the 40s crooner hosted David Bowie, the glam rocker, on his Christmas show. The awkwardness of the meeting is palpable. An older, crusty Crosby had no real familiarity with the younger, androgynous Bowie, and Bowie wasn’t crazy about singing The Little Drummer Boy. So, shortly before the show’s taping, a team of writers had to frantically retool the song, blending the traditional Christmas song with a newly-written tune called Peace on Earth. After one hour of rehearsal, the two singers recorded The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth and made an instant little chestnut. The Washington Post has the backstory on the strange Bing-Bowie meeting. We hope you enjoy revisiting this classic clip with us. Happy holidays to you all.
As a lifelong Johnny Cash fan, raised on country, gospel, blues and folk and all their outlaw cousins, I spent my adolescence listening to 1969’s Live from San Quentin and imagining the scene: Cash, who never served hard time, singing about prison life to hardened men who greeted him as kindred. Little did I know, wonders of the Internet to behold, that there is actual footage of the concert online. And so there it is above, and it’s great. Johnny mocks the guards, gets theatrically belligerent, and rocks out outlaw country style with “San Quentin,” voicing every prisoner’s grievances with his gravelly delivery. His glare is hypnotic, and the song plays over footage of armed guards on the fences and inmates marched in herds.
Of course, there’s no San Quentin without Cash’s first prison concert, 1968’s At Folsom Prison. The documentary below (with Swedish subtitles) opens with interviews from country stalwarts Marty Stuart and Cash’s daughter Roseanne; it’s an hour-long exploration of the Folsom prison concert and its import.
Cash loved giving these concerts, and he loved the men inside, not because he was one of them but because he knew he could have been if music hadn’t saved him. He gave another concert in 1977 at the Tennessee State Prison, but this recording never had the impact that those first two did. Cash’s appearances at Folsom and San Quentin in some ways defined his career as a writer and singer of outlaw songs who cared about the men who paid the price for law and order.
Josh Jones is a writer and scholar currently completing a dissertation on landscape, literature, and labor.
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When seized with the desire to learn where their food comes from, many of today’s readers turn to Michael Pollan, author of books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules. Perhaps you know him as the guy who popularized the guiding words, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” If you’ve studied at the University of California, Berkeley, you might also know him as a professor at their Graduate School of Journalism. Possessed of both a journalist’s curiosity about sources and processes and a professor’s ability to explain — not to mention based in the same consciously hedonistic city that gave rise to Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse — Pollan has positioned himself well to remain America’s foremost public intellectual of the edible. Who else would UC Berkeley want to lead their Edible Education courses?
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.
Thirty years ago the British television company Channel Four premiered this enchanting, lyrical film based on the award-winning Raymond Briggs children’s book, The Snowman.
The tale bears some resemblance to the earlier American story, “Frosty the Snowman,” but probes deeper into the psychology of children, conveying the fear and wonder they feel in a mysterious world, and their longing for friendship and magic. It’s more elegantly told, too, using only pictures and music to convey the story. And just as Maurice Sendak said “I refuse to lie to children,” Briggs refuses to provide a Hollywood ending.
The original version of The Snowman includes an introduction by Briggs. A later version (see above) has a similar introduction by David Bowie, who plays the grownup boy from the story. As the introduction ends, Bowie opens a drawer and pulls out a scarf that was given to him during his adventure with the snowman, proving that it was not just a dream.
In 1983, The Snowman was nominated for an Academy Award. It ranks 71st on the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest British television programs and was voted number four in UKTV Gold’s “Greatest TV Christmas Moments.” Watching The Snowman has become a holiday tradition in the UK in much the same way that watching A Charlie Brown Christmas has in America. Tonight in Britain, Channel 4 will premiere the long-awaited sequel, The Snowman and the Snowdog, set 30 years later at the same house but with a different boy.
Those prone to using “twee” as a pejorative, particularly in connection to the films of Wes Anderson, should lay in a supply of antidote before viewing the animated short, Cabbit.
Its creators describe the titular character as “a charming little animal spirit whom (sic) spends its days tea-dancing with kindred spirits and exploring the wonders of the natural world.”
As in The Lorax, industry and the foolish humans in its thrall are major baddies. But whereas the apoplectic Lorax takes an activist stance, Cabbit drifts along, serene in its tweeds.
As ecological statements go, it’s pretty mild stuff.
For this viewer, the more intriguing element is the back story. In animation terms, Cabbit is a throwback, painstakingly hand drawn with Sharpie markers by a mostly housebound Missoula artist, who flies under the code name Soogie. His craftsmanship caught the attention of sound designer, John Kassab, who saw punk where others saw twee. Kassab may not pilot a dirigible or squash possums with his Model T, but as humans go, he’s pretty up on technology. With Kassab as producer, Soogie waged a Kickstarter campaign, successfully tea dancing with kindred spirits who underwrote the purchase of high end digital equipment. Kassab’s next goal is to usher the otherworldly, anthromorphic Cabbit onto the film festival circuit. Til then, it must abide entirely within the confines of this steampunk world we refer to as the Internet.
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