Culture & Media news

• RIP Shane MacGowan: Watch the Celtic Punk Rocker Perform with Nick Cave, Kirsty MacColl & the Dubliners

  01-12-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  Shane MacGowan died yesterday, less than a month shy of his 66th birthday — and thus less than a month shy of Christmas, which happened to be the same day. Though coincidental, that association has made perfect sense since 1987, when the Pogues, the Celtic punk band fronted by MacGowan, released “Fairytale of New York.” That duet between MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl (the story of whose production we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture) still reigns supreme as the U
  
  Read more

• The Great Courses (Formerly The Teaching Company) Puts Every Course on Sale Until the End of Black Friday

  23-11-2023 23:32 via openculture.com
  Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) has put every course on sale for Black Friday. DVD courses are on sale for $60, and online courses for $40. Shipping is free. And if you use the promo code displayed on their web site, you get an extra 10% off.
  If you’re not familiar with it, the company provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any
  
  Read more

• TrueVisions, PCCW Media & Beijing ATW Culture land Woodcut ... - TBI Vision

  23-11-2023 12:40 via news.google.com
  TrueVisions, PCCW Media & Beijing ATW Culture land Woodcut ...  TBI Vision
  
  Read more

• Conferința Media & Culture Days de la Bucureşti s-a încheiat ... - Rador

  17-11-2023 17:50 via news.google.com
  Conferința Media & Culture Days de la Bucureşti s-a încheiat ...  Rador
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive a Century Later

  15-11-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  Image by The Wellcome Trust
  When researching a famous historical figure, access to their work and materials usually proves to be one of the biggest obstacles. But things are much more difficult for those writing about the life of Marie Curie, the scientist who, along her with husband Pierre, discovered polonium and radium and birthed the idea of particle physics. Her notebooks, her clothing, her furniture (not to mention her lab), pretty much everything surviving from her Parisian suburban hous
  
  Read more

• Recap: Das war das PEOPLE & CULTURE FESTIVAL 2023, media ... - lifePR

  10-11-2023 11:28 via news.google.com
  
  Recap: Das war das PEOPLE & CULTURE FESTIVAL 2023, media ...  lifePR
  
  Read more

• Sweet Sorrow | Arts & Culture - Indiana Public Media

  09-11-2023 23:22 via news.google.com
  
  Sweet Sorrow | Arts & Culture  Indiana Public Media
  
  Read more

• One Hour of David Lynch Listening to Rain, Smoking & Reflecting on Art

  09-11-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  At this point, there’s no need to point out the dangers posed by smoking. Those who do it these days do it in full knowledge of the health risks involved, for reasons of their own. Sometimes those reasons are artistic ones: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it,” says David Lynch in Jon Nguyen’s documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, describing his youthful conception of what it was to be an artist. “Maybe g
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

  09-11-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  
  Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum
  On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly def
  
  Read more

• Why People Hate Brutalist Buildings on American College Campuses

  08-11-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Many Americans receive their introduction to the style known as Brutalism in college. This owes less to courses in twentieth-century architecture than to university campuses themselves, which tend to have been expanded or even wholly constructed in the decades immediately following the Second World War. As Vox’s Dean Peterson explains in the new video above, its veterans returned home eager to receive the tertiary education to which the G.I. Bill entitled them, which “necessitated th
  
  Read more

• How Rocky Horror Became a Cult Phenomenon

  08-11-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Call us old fashioned but invoking pumpkin spice and The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the same breath feels transgressive to the point of sacrilege.
  The creator of the Polyphonic video, above, is on much firmer footing tying the film to queer liberation.
  Prior to its now famous cinematic adaptation, The Rocky Horror Show was a low budget theatrical success, with nearly 3,000 performances and the 1973 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical to its name.Reviewer Michael Billington lauded T
  
  Read more

• A Secret Room with Drawings Attributed to Michelangelo Opens to Visitors in Florence

  07-11-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Images on this page come courtesy of the Musei del Bargello
  In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII — who, not coincidentally, was born Giulio de’ Medici. That famous dynasty, which once seemed to hold absolute economic and political power in Florence, had just seen off a violent challenge to its rule by republican-minded Florentines who, emboldened by the sack of Rome in 1527, took their city from the House of Medici that same year. Alas, that part
  
  Read more

• Watch David Bowie Perform “Starman” on Top of the Pops: Voted the Greatest Music Performance Ever on the BBC (1972)

  07-11-2023 10:03 via openculture.com
  
  The Beatles were made for black-and-white television, as evidenced by the immediacy with which their 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show launched them into permanent international superstardom. Though only a few years younger than the Fab Four, their countryman David Bowie arose in a different era: that of color television, with its vastly expanded aesthetic range. Bowie is known to have carried himself as if his own international superstardom was guaranteed, even during his early years of
  
  Read more

• Dorothea Tanning: The Artist Who Pushed the Boundaries of Surrealism

  06-11-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  As Great Art Explained‘s James Payne notes in the above profile of Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, the emotional and psychological complexity of her work invites interpretation, particularly when it comes to one of best known paintings, 1943’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
  Its doors, young girls (femme-enfants, if you prefer) and sunflower were recurrent themes for her.
  What’s it mean?
  Tanning maintained the painting is about “confrontation:”
  Everyone believes he/she is his/
  
  Read more

• The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Historical Primers That Help Explain the Century-Long Conflict

  06-11-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  On October 7th, Hamas invaded Israel and brutally massacred 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. On a per capita basis, the attack amounted to twelve 9/11s (per The Economist). It also marked the single bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Faced with an existential threat, Israel has launched its own devastating invasion of Gaza, with the goal of destroying Hamas leadership. Already, the assault has left 9,000 civilians dead and tipped the population into a humanitarian crisis. Barring a c
  
  Read more

• Faith, Media & Culture - Page 128 of 128 - Beliefnet

  03-11-2023 14:56 via news.google.com
  
  Faith, Media & Culture - Page 128 of 128  Beliefnet
  
  Read more

• The Beatles Release Their Final Song, “Now and Then”: Hear the Song & Watch the Music Video Directed by Peter Jackson

  03-11-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  The average music fan of the nineteen-sixties would surely have found it hard to believe that the Rolling Stones would put out a new album in 2023, let alone an album including a performance by Paul McCartney. Here in the twenty-twenties, of course, we’ve long since known that the “rivalry” between the young Stones and Beatles was ginned up by music media. Still, not to be outdone more than half a century after their breakup, the latter have put out the newly completed “N
  
  Read more

• Get the First Month of Coursera Plus for $1: Provides Access to 6,000+ Courses and Many Professional Certificates

  03-11-2023 09:41 via openculture.com
  
  A quick heads up on a deal: From now (November 2) until November 24, you can get the first month of Coursera Plus for just $1. (It normally costs $59 per month.) With a Coursera Plus plan, you will have unlimited access to 6,000 courses from top universities and companies. This includes Professional Certificate programs offered by companies like Google, Meta, and IBM, covering such topics as: Data Analytics, Project Management, UX Design, Cybersecurity, Business Intelligence, and more. The cost
  
  Read more

• Alain de Botton Presents an ASMR Reading of Proust’s Swann’s Way

  03-11-2023 09:00 via openculture.com
  
  Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) over many years. The first volume, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), came out in 1913, and the last volume, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé), was published posthumously in 1927. A monumental exploration of memory, time, and human experience, the seven-volume novel consists of 1,267,069 words. That doubles those in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, making it one of the longest novels e
  
  Read more

• Watch the Trailer for the Long-Lost First Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1926)

  02-11-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Despite being a perennial contender for the title of the Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has eluded a wholly satisfying cinematic adaptation. The most recent such attempt, now a decade old, was primarily a Baz Lurhmann kitsch extravaganza showcasing Leonardo DiCaprio; nor did its predecessors, which put in the title role such classic leading men as Robert Redford and Alan Ladd, ever distinguish themselves in an enduring way. But these pictures all met with happ
  
  Read more

• The Making of the Last Beatles Song, “Now and Then”: A Short Film

  02-11-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  During the pandemic, Peter Jackson’s documentary, Get Back, used cutting-edge software to restore footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be recording sessions. If you watched the film, you know it was magic. Now, his technology offers us another gift–the final Beatles song.
  As the short film explains above, the making of the song, “Now and Then,” began in 1995, when Paul, George and Ringo started working with a demo recorded by John Lennon during the 1970s. The project ev
  
  Read more

• Leonardo da Vinci Created the Design for the Miter Lock, Which Is Still Used in the Panama and Suez Canals

  01-11-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  “A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Panama”: we all know the piece of infrastructure to which this famous palindrome refers. But who, exactly, is the man? Some might imagine President Theodore Roosevelt in the role, given his oversight of the project’s acquisition by the United States of America. But it’s more commonly thought to be George W. Goethals, the Roosevelt-appointed chief engineer who brought it to completion two years early. Then again, one could also make the case
  
  Read more

• Animated: The Rise & Fall of the Largest Cities in the World, from 3,000 BC to the 2020s

  01-11-2023 09:00 via openculture.com
  
  This is the first era of human history when more of us live in cities than not. That’s what we’ve often been told in recent years, at least, though the specifics do depend on what kinds of urbanized areas  you count as proper cities. Still, this would seem to mark an important inflection point in human history, the past five millennia of which has also been the history of great cities rising and falling, in absolute terms but also relative to one another in size, power, and infl
  
  Read more

• Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman & More

  31-10-2023 10:30 via openculture.com
  
  It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at tournaments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s characterization of the political right and left, scholars and writers represent opposing poles, the hothouse and the street. That rare beast
  
  Read more

• Meet the Man Who Created the Iconic Emblem of the Day of the Dead: José Guadalupe Posada

  31-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Odds are you’re acquainted with the lady pictured above.
  She’s called La Catrina, and her likeness adorns countless t-shirts and tote bags.
  She is a popular Halloween costume and a mainstay of Day of the Dead celebrations.
  She pops up in the animated family feature, Coco, to guide its young hero to the Land of the Dead. 
  She’s spent the better part of a century making cameos in numerous artists works, most famously Diego Rivera’s surreal 1947 mural, Sue&nt
  
  Read more

• Jerry Garcia Explains How Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Changed His Life (1995)

  31-10-2023 08:20 via openculture.com
  
  If you’re looking for a classic monster movie to watch this Halloween, and one that will also give you a few non-ironic laughs along the way, you’d do well to put on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But don’t take this recommendation from me: take it from the Grateful Dead’s own Jerry Garcia, who recalls his own formative viewing experience in the clip above from a 1995 broadcast of AMC’s The Movie that Changed My Life. When Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenste
  
  Read more

• All Saints: The 'Miracle Club' of Reconciliation – Benedictine ... - media.benedictine.edu

  30-10-2023 11:57 via news.google.com
  
  All Saints: The 'Miracle Club' of Reconciliation – Benedictine ...  media.benedictine.edu
  
  Read more

• All Saints: The 'Miracle Club' of Reconciliation – Benedictine ... - Benedictine College

  30-10-2023 11:57 via news.google.com
  
  All Saints: The 'Miracle Club' of Reconciliation – Benedictine ...  Benedictine College
  
  Read more

• The Writing Systems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alphabet to the Abugidas of India

  30-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  The Korean alphabet, hangul, is “the most scientific writing system.” One often hears that in South Korea, a society that has taken to heart Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer’s description of hangul as “perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country.” But whatever their scientific credentials, all the other writing systems in use (and indeed out of use) have fascinating qualities of their own, a range of which are explained in the UsefulC
  
  Read more

• Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies, Packed with Horror & Suspense

  29-10-2023 18:55 via openculture.com
  
  In 1999, Stephen King found himself confined to a hospital room “after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the shit out of me on a country road.” There, “roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers,” and surely more than a little bored, he popped a movie into the room’s VCR. But it didn’t take long before its cinematic power got the better of him: “I asked my son, who was watching with me, to turn the damn thing off. It may be the only t
  
  Read more

• Culture Ministry opens applications for 'Emerging New Media Artists ... - Saudi Gazette

  29-10-2023 15:49 via news.google.com
  
  Culture Ministry opens applications for 'Emerging New Media Artists ...  Saudi Gazette
  
  Read more

• Arts, Culture & Entertainment: Parker Symphony marks anniversary - Colorado Community Media

  27-10-2023 20:00 via news.google.com
  
  Arts, Culture & Entertainment: Parker Symphony marks anniversary  Colorado Community Media
  
  Read more

• How the CIA Secretly Used Jackson Pollock & Other Abstract Expressionists to Fight the Cold War

  27-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  What’s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation about the supposed American tendency toward low-minded, expedient philistinism. I grant, as an American myself, that such humor surrounds at least a grain of truth. But there was a time when the federal government of the U.S., an organization not often accused of excessive high-mindedness, to
  
  Read more

• The Talking Heads Reunite on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Revisit Their Early Days as a Band

  27-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Late this summer, the Talking Heads released a remastered version of their concert film, Stop Making Sense. Although the film has already left some theaters, the band hasn’t stopped promoting it. Above, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth join Stephen Colbert and reminisce about their adventures at RISD, CBGBs, and touring with The Ramones. It’s great seeing the band sharing a stage (and a laugh) again, even if there are no instruments in sight. Find Part
  
  Read more

• Media tour spotlights centuries of ceramic culture - TravelDailyNews ... - TravelDailyNews Asia-Pacific

  27-10-2023 06:33 via news.google.com
  
  Media tour spotlights centuries of ceramic culture - TravelDailyNews ...  TravelDailyNews Asia-Pacific
  
  Read more

• A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor & Performs “Nothing Compares 2 U”

  26-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  The building that houses Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre began life as Dan Lowrey’s Star of Erin Music Hall.
  It has undergone several name changes over the course of its 145 years, and played host to drama, opera, ballet, films, oratorio, pantomime, variety shows, and world-famous popular musicians like David Bowie, REM, Foo Fighters… and Dublin native Sinéad O’Connor, who arrived at the venue in 2011, unceremoniously toting her aluminum foil-wrapped lunch.
  Her fifteen-
  
  Read more

• Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

  26-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  When François Rabelais came up with a couple of giants to put at the center of a series of inventive and ribald works of satirical fiction, he named one of them Gargantua. That may not sound particularly clever today, gargantuan being a fairly common adjective to describe anything quite large. But we actually owe the word itself to Rabelais, or more specifically, to the nearly half-millennium-long legacy of the character into whom he breathed life. But there’s so much more to Les C
  
  Read more

• A Free Digital Archive of Graphic Design: A Curated Collection of Design Treasures from the Internet Archive

  25-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  We’ve got a thing for creative problem solvers here at Open Culture.
  We also love a good community-spirited project.
  Graphic designer Valery Marier ticks both boxes with archives.design, a free graphic design archive that was born of her frustrations with online research at a time when Covid restrictions shuttered libraries and archives.The non-profit digital library Internet Archive is rich in interesting material, but its lack of curation can often leave the user feeling like they&
  
  Read more

• How the “Lost Cities” of the Amazon Were Finally Discovered

  25-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  About a decade and a half ago, The Lost City of Z seemed to have been placed front-and-center in most bookstores of the English-speaking world. It was the first book by journalist David Grann, and it handily proved that he knew how to deal with history in a way that could capture the public imagination. (His second, Killers of the Flower Moon, provided the basis for the acclaimed Martin Scorsese film now in theaters.) Subtitled A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, the book tells of British
  
  Read more

• Mount St. Scholastica Celebrates 160 Years – Benedictine College ... - media.benedictine.edu

  24-10-2023 22:05 via news.google.com
  
  Mount St. Scholastica Celebrates 160 Years – Benedictine College ...  media.benedictine.edu
  
  Read more

• Mount St. Scholastica Celebrates 160 Years – Benedictine College ... - Benedictine College

  24-10-2023 22:05 via news.google.com
  
  Mount St. Scholastica Celebrates 160 Years – Benedictine College ...  Benedictine College
  
  Read more

• The History of the Electric Guitar Solo: A Seven-Part Series

  24-10-2023 16:18 via openculture.com
  
  ?si=cPPdX0lEFTgicTQV
  No instrument is more closely identified with rock and roll music than the electric guitar, and no form of performance is more closely associated with the electric guitar than the solo. You can hardly discuss any of those three without discussing the others. Hence the broad sweep of Axe to Grind, the new seven-part video series from Youtube music channel Polyphonic on the electric guitar solo, a cultural phenomenon that can’t be explained without telling the story of
  
  Read more

• David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Surrealist Video

  24-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  A staple of Andean diets for thousands of years, quinoa (KEEN-wah) has been touted as a superfood recently for its high protein content and potential to solve hunger crises. It’s represented by the usual celebrities: Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston … and David Lynch. Oh yes, have you not tried David Lynch’s quinoa recipe? Well, you must. If you’ve remained unswayed by the glitterati, perhaps this very Lynchian of pitches will turn you on to the grain. W
  
  Read more

• Watch the Sesame Street Episode Banned for Being Too Scary, Featuring The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (1976)

  23-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  In 1939, Margaret Hamilton made cinema history as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. In 1976, she made television history by reprising the role on a Sesame Street episode that was pulled from the show’s rotation immediately after it aired.  It seems to have drawn Sesame Workshop, then known as the Children’s Television Workshop, a fair few complaints from the parents of disturbed children. As a result, writes Mental Floss’ Michele Debczak, “the episode
  
  Read more

• A New Horror-Themed Tarot Deck Draws on a Century’s Worth of Scary Movies, Comics & Magazines

  23-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  Halloween looms.
  Have we got a tarot deck for you!
  Todd Alcott, the mad scientist responsible for Open Culture’s favorite midcentury graphic mashups, infuses his Horror Tarot with a century’s worth of hair-raising, spine-tingling imagery.
  The artist admires the genre’s capacity for conveying subversive messages, explaining that “horror is where we think about the unthinkable and revel in the things that are bad for us:”
  Drama can exalt the finest in humanity, but h
  
  Read more

• With 77% ownership, G.H.Y Culture & Media Holding Co., Limited (SGX:XJB) insiders have a lot riding on the company's future - Yahoo Finance

  23-10-2023 06:37 via news.google.com
  
  With 77% ownership, G.H.Y Culture & Media Holding Co., Limited (SGX:XJB) insiders have a lot riding on the company's future  Yahoo Finance
  
  Read more

• Download 222 Belle Époque Art Posters: An Online Archive of Masterpieces from the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1880-1918)

  20-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth: what a time and place to be alive. Or rather, what a time and place to be alive for people in the right countries and, more importantly, of the right classes, those who saw a new world taking shape around them and partook of it with all possible heartiness. The period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, best known by its French name La Belle Époque, saw not
  
  Read more

• Gustave Doré’s Magnificent Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

  20-10-2023 10:00 via openculture.com
  
  One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one of the most memorable and popular illustrated editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time completing a set of engravings for an 1866 English Bible. He probably could have stopped there and assured his place in posterity, but he would go on to illustrate an 1872 guide to London
  
  Read more

• The Pretend Gardener | Arts & Culture - Indiana Public Media

  20-10-2023 04:34 via news.google.com
  
  The Pretend Gardener | Arts & Culture  Indiana Public Media
  
  Read more

• Watch David Byrne Practice His Dance Moves for Stop Making Sense in Newly Released Behind-the-Scenes Footage

  19-10-2023 11:00 via openculture.com
  
  A new 4K restoration of Stop Making Sense debuted last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, then opened in theaters around the world. The promotional push for this cultural event started early (as featured here on Open Culture), and has involved the release of rarely-seen supplementary materials chosen to delight Talking Heads fans. Take the short video above, a compilation of video clips in which David Byrne rehearses his dance moves in advance of the band’s 1983 Speaking in
  
  Read more

Follow @CultureMediaNws on Twitter!