Fight The Power: The Politics Of Hip-Hop
Jill Stein Announces Third-Party Bid for President
The George Floyd Uprising - Vortex Group (2023)
Best Tribute Albums: 40 Classic Albums Honoring Great Artists
Red Desert - Michelangelo Antonioni (1964)
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Historical Primers That Help Explain the Century-Long Conflict
A Beginner’s Guide to Looking at the Universe
Invite - Trio Chemirani (2011)
Merchant's House Museum
The Black Album - Prince (1987)
Paris’s First Underground Soundsystems
Dur Dur of Somalia - Volume 1, Volume 2 & Previously Unreleased Tracks (Analog Africa Nr. 27)
An Extremely Detailed Guide to an Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods
How Israel and Palestine Became Enemies | With Palki Sharma
Now’s The Time To Celebrate The Genius Of Charlie Parker
St. Marks Is Dead - Ada Calhoun (2015)
Russian Landmines Carry On the War Against Civilians in Ukraine
Four Figures at a Table, by the Le Nain Brothers, c 1643
Counter Intelligence: Los Angeles
Jaco Pastorius, An Introduction To The Jazz Legend
New York City Water Towers: How They Work
The History of the Electric Guitar Solo: A Seven-Part Series
Once Upon a Time in America - (Extended Director's Cut)
Rivers of Babylon - The Melodians (1970)
The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer
Like a Virgo: Spectacle, submission, and an endless European summer
"Virgo season's come and gone, the season of people who tighten their belts and straighten their backs, a time characterized by a destructive willingness to exert oneself without being able to answer the question, Why? A Virgo is her own worst enemy, and so, as a Virgo, to enter into a period of energetic overlap between personal and collective experience means the exacerbation of an already overly sensitive temperament. This is a kind of disclaimer. For such was the state in which I attended the press viewing at Fotografiska in early September. ..."
Monika Baer, Untitled, 2022/2023
Illuminating: an illustrated guide to some of the world’s most remote lighthouses
"JosĂ© Luis González MacĂas acknowledges that he was
not the most obvious person to write a book about lighthouses. 'I grew
up a long way from the sea and had no personal connection with the world
of seafaring,' he says. 'My professional life has been more centred on
books than coastlines.' As a writer, designer,
illustrator and publisher of books and graphic materials for museums
and other cultural institutions, he had always dreamed of creating a
personal project that would put equal emphasis on images and text, but
the fascination with lighthouses came later. ..."
NEU!
"Neu! ... German for 'New!'; styled in block capitals) were a West German krautrock band formed in DĂĽsseldorf in 1971 by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother following their departure from Kraftwerk. The group's albums were produced by Conny Plank, who has been regarded as the group's 'hidden member'. They released three albums in their initial incarnation—Neu! (1972), Neu! 2 (1973), and Neu! 75 (1975)—before disbanding in 1975. They briefly reunited in the mid-1980s. ..."
How the New York City Steam System Works
"Our latest Untapped New York podcast
episode is out, all about how the New York City steam system works.
Have you ever wondered about those orange and white smokestacks you see
in the middle of New York’s streets with steam flowing out of them? To
find out more, we’ve gone straight to the source by interviewing Frank
Cuomo, the general manager for steam operations at Con Edison. We also
spoke with Mark Reigelman, an artist who used the steam system for one of our favorite guerrilla art installations ever. ..."
What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Masterpiece: Great Books Explained
"Here on Open Culture, we’ve often featured the work of gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, creator of the channel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his examination of the work of RenĂ© Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter responsible for such enduring images as Le fils de l’homme, or The Son of Man. Payne uses that famous image of a bowler-hatted everyman whose face is covered by a green apple again in the video above, but this time to represent a literary character: Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. ..."
The Last Angel of History - John Akomfrah (1996)
"The Last Angel of History is a 45-minute documentary, directed in 1996 by John Akomfrah and written and researched by Edward George of the Black Audio Film Collective, that deals with concepts of Afrofuturism as a metaphor for the displacement of black culture and roots. The film is a hybrid documentary and fictional narrative. ... The structure of the film makes it a meta-narrative commenting on while also becoming part of the genre of Afrofuturism. The film uses concepts based on George Clinton's Mothership Connection and features interviews with Clinton, Derrick May, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nichelle Nichols, Juan Atkins, DJ Spooky, Goldie, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Bernard Harris, Kodwo Eshun, Carl Craig, and A Guy Called Gerald to explore the link between black music as a way of exploring the future. The film makes mention of Sun Ra, whose work centres on the return of blacks to outer space in his own Mothership.
The Lasting Whole Earth Catalog
"When the Whole Earth Catalog arrived in the Fall of 01968, it came bearing a simple, epochal label: ‘Access to Tools.’ As its editor and Long Now Co-founder Stewart Brand wrote in the introduction to that first edition, the goal was for the Catalog to serve as an ‘evaluation and access device’ for tools that empowered its readers ‘to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.’ The key word in all of that idealistic declaration of purpose was ‘access.’ The Whole Earth Catalog did not intend to directly grant its readers this knowledge, wisdom, and mastery, but to provide a kaleidoscopic array of gateways from which they could attempt to find it themselves. ..."
The Long Now Foundation X: The Lasting Whole Earth Catalog
The George Orwell guide to the perfect cup of tea
"British novelist George Orwell dedicated his writing to unravelling complex societal structures. Best known for penning Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four,
his opposition to totalitarianism and ardent support of socialism
undercut his most major works. He tackled class inequality, bleak
dystopian futures, and capitalism in his poetry, fiction, and journalism
– but in 1946, he tackled his most divisive subject yet. How to make
the perfect cup of tea. ..."
2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016), 2019 September: What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural, 2021 November: Down and out in George Orwell’s Paris: A guide to the secret Paname
Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values
"Israel stands on the verge of invading
Gaza in response to the terrorist attacks by Hamas that many, including
Israel’s leaders, have compared to Sept. 11 not just because of the
scale and savagery but also because the terrorists sought to destroy the
tranquillity of daily life. They killed the very young and the very
old, the strong and the weak, civilians and soldiers; they took some 150
hostages, including children, and survivors said the attackers raped women — all to send a message that no Israeli was safe. Israel
has a responsibility to its citizens to hold accountable the
perpetrators of this violence, but as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week, 'How Israel does this matters.' ..."
The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time
"... The guitar is the most universal instrument, the most primal, and the most expressive. Anybody can pick up a little guitar in no time at all, but you can spend a lifetime exploring its possibilities. That’s why thinking about what makes a great guitarist is so much fun. Rolling Stone published its original list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists in 2011. It was compiled by a panel of musicians, mostly older classic rockers. Our new expanded list was made by the editors and writers of Rolling Stone. This one goes to 250. ..."
89 | Lou Reed