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Thursday, September 7th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:16a | NASA Lets You Download Free Posters Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager Missions
A quick fyi: Last year, NASA released 14 Free Posters That Depict the Future of Space Travel in a Captivatingly Retro Style. Now, on the 40th anniversary of the Voyager missions (Aug. 20 and Sept. 5, 1977), the space agency has issued three attractive new posters to celebrate our "ambassadors to the rest of the Milky Way." All are free to download and print here. Writes Space.com: "One of the Voyager posters is an image of a starry night sky [see above], and another advertises the mission using the flamboyant design style of the 1970s, the decade when the probes launched. A third poster honors the probes' 'grand tour' of the planets, on their way to the edge of the solar system." Happy downloading! Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: How the Iconic 1968 “Earthrise” Photo Was Made: An Engrossing Visualization by NASA NASA Archive Collects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Planet Ray Bradbury Reads Moving Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mission NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App NASA Sends Image of the Mona Lisa to the Moon and Back Free Interactive e-Books from NASA Reveal History, Discoveries of the Hubble & Webb Telescopes Leonard Nimoy Narrates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voyage to the Origins of the Solar System The Best of NASA Space Shuttle Videos (1981-2010)
NASA Lets You Download Free Posters Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager Missions is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 10:01a | Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Performance (1975): “Imagine,” “Stand By Me” & More
After each heartbreaking loss of a musical icon this past year and a half, we have turned to their greatest moments onstage, not necessarily their last, because their final shows weren’t always all that memorable. Declining health, bad recordings… and not every gig is a good one even in the best of times and with the best of performers. But when it comes to John Lennon’s last public appearance, I like to think he might have left the stage exactly the way he wanted to, as a rocker, a provocateur, and a pisstaker in a candy-apple red jumpsuit, backed by a nine-piece miming band of bald men in black leather with masks painted on the back of their heads.
Credited as “John Lennon, Etc.,” the band’s true name, given to them by Lennon himself, is abbreviated on their bass drum: B.O.M.F., or “Brothers of Mother Fuckers.” It was Lennon’s send off to his own career as much as it was a Salute to Sir Lew, as the program was called. Just a few months later Sean was born, and Lennon declared he would retire to raise his son. At the time of his tragic death five years later, he had begun recording again, releasing Double Fantasy and planning a second double album, Milk and Honey. But we never got to see him perform those songs. The honoree for Lennon’s last gig was Sir Lew Grade, “a powerful media mogul,” notes Dangerous Minds, “with roots in cabaret and variety shows.” A man known as much for his ruthlessness in business as for his Charleston, which he performed on tabletops whenever the mood struck him. In 1969 Grade bought up the rights to over a hundred Lennon and McCartney songs, after some very tense negotiations. Lennon sued Grade in 1974 and settled out of court, and Grade remained the co-publisher of all of his new songs.
As part of the settlement, Lennon recorded his album of covers of classic rock ‘n’ roll songs, appropriately titled Rock ‘n’ Roll. When he appeared at the tribute concert for Sir Lew at the Hilton Hotel in New York—on the bill with Julie Andrews, Tom Jones, and Peter Sellers—he played Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin,” and Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” for “a “who’s who of the old Hollywood elite,” including Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Gene Kelly, and Orson Welles. The show, recorded for TV broadcast, cut his rendition of “Stand by Me" (hear the audio above), but they did air his final song, “Imagine,” which turned out to be the last song he ever sang live onstage (top).
Lennon is in very good form, and seemingly in good spirits. The year previous, he’d scored a number one hit with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night." According at least to Paul McCartney and Lennon’s girlfriend May Pang, he had even considered reuniting the Beatles. In November of 1974, Lennon joined Elton John onstage at Madison Square Garden for rollicking versions of “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” on which Elton had played in the studio. You can see them perform the song above in what is technically Lennon’s last live concert appearance. His final appearance on stage, on the other hand, while it might have been an odd way to say goodbye, whether he meant to do so or not, may not be what we revisit when we revisit Lennon. Why did he agree to do a tribute concert “for a man he had been embroiled in lawsuits with?” With a stage show that many have thought was deliberately designed to antagonize the honoree? We’ll never know. But I’m grateful that his final live song was one that still speaks to us of hope and possibility. Maybe bowing to censors, Lennon changes “Imagine”’s controversial line about religion. Instead, he sings, “Nothing to kill or die for, no immigration, too," referring both to his troubles with the U.S. immigration authorities and to the borderless world the song projects. “Imagine there’s no countries… Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” Related Content: The Night John Lennon & Yoko Ono Jammed with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East (1971) Get a Fly-on-the-Wall View of John Lennon Recording & Arranging His Classic Song, “Imagine” (1971) John Lennon’s Solo Albums Now Streaming for Free on Spotify Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Performance (1975): “Imagine,” “Stand By Me” & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 1:30p | Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968)
“What if there were no punch lines?" asks Steve Martin in his autobiography Born Standing Up. "What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?" These questions motivated him to develop the distinctive style of stand-up comedy — in a sense, an anti-stand-up comedy — that rocketed him to superstardom in the 1970s. But before the world knew him as a banjo-playing funnyman, Martin worked for a couple of his especially notable comedian-musician elders: Tom and Dick Smothers, better known as the Smothers Brothers. "We happened to be walking through the writer area of the show, and there he was, sitting at one of our writers' desks," Tom says of Martin on the 1968 broadcast of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour above. "Later we found out that he actually was one of our writers. Since he hasn't been paid for his work, we thought we'd let him come out tonight and make a few dollars." So introduced, the 22-year-old Martin begins his television debut by re-introducing himself: "As Tom just said, I'm Steve Martin, and I'll be out here in a minute. While I'm waiting for me, I'd like to jump into kind of a socko-boffo comedy routine." With his prop table ready, he then launches into "the fabulous glove-into-dove trick." Though the studio audience may look pretty square by today's standards (or even those of the late 1960s), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had already built a reputation for pushing the envelope of mainstream television comedy. Still, it's safe to say that its audience had never seen any performer – and certainly not any prop comic — quite like Martin before. In this short set, he performs a number of deliberately botched or otherwise askew magic tricks, using his tone to generate the humor. "If I kept denying them the formality of a punch line," as he writes more than 40 years later in Born Standing Up, "the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.” Watching today, Martin's fans will recognize his trademark sensibility more quickly than his appearance, since the clip predates both the white suit and the white hair. Even then, he wanted to perform in a way that, in the words of The Guardian's Rafael Behr, "would unnerve and alienate the audience, but also, through self-deprecation, engage them in conspiracy against himself." Martin seems to take a dim view of his own early television work, having described himself in a 1971 Virginia Graham Show appearance as "mannered, slow and self-aware. I had absolutely no authority," a quality that he has since developed in abundance, and of which "the art of having an act so bad it was good," as Behr puts it, demands a surprising amount. Related Content: Steve Martin Will Teach His First Online Course on Comedy Steve Martin on the Legendary Bluegrass Musician Earl Scruggs Steve Martin Writes a Hymn for Hymn-Less Atheists Steve Martin, “Home Crafts Expert,” Explains the Art of Paper Wadding, Endorses Bob Kerrey Steve Martin Releases Bluegrass Album/Animated Video Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 2:47p | The Addams Family Dance to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”
In the spirit of Andrew Sullivan's Mental Health Break, we give you this: The Addams Family Dancing to The Ramones' 1976 track, "Blitzkrieg Bop." For a brief moment, forget the hurricanes, the threat of nuclear war, the fires burning in LA, Montana, Washington, DC and the hearts of white supremacists. Breathe in. Breathe out. And repeat after me. "Hey Ho......Let's go!" Related Content: John Astin, From The Addams Family, Recites “The Raven” as Edgar Allan Poe The Ramones’ First Press Release: We’re Part Musicians, Dentists & Degenerates (1975) Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapted from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake The Addams Family Dance to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:09p | The Top 100 American Films of All Time, According to 62 International Film Critics
Entertainment first, and art second? Hasn't that always been the American way when it comes to film? And is that how the rest of the world sees it, especially considering France’s love of Jerry Lewis, Germany’s obsession with David Hasselhoff, and China taking Nicholas Cage’s career choices more seriously than he does himself? In this list of The 100 Greatest American Films, the BBC polled 62 international film critics to see what they thought were the United States' enduring contributions to cinema culture. The films only needed to be funded by American companies—the directors could be from other countries. (If not, about a third of these choices would be disqualified. Five are by Hitchcock alone.) As for other favorite directors, Spielberg gets five (although the highest entry, Jaws, comes in at 38) and Billy Wilder gets five, with The Apartment the highest ranked at 24. The most popular decade for film is the 1970s, the top two being Coppola’s first two Godfather films. (It would be interesting to know the median age of these 62 critics, just to see if their formative years align with the decade.) Of the 100, here’s the Top 10: 10. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) Comparing this list to BFI’s 2012 list of the Top 100 films of all time, there isn’t much difference in the top spots. And, in the years to come, I suspect those top four films will switch places occasionally but never really leave. Instead, the surprises come further down the list. Gone with the Wind used to be considered a classic, no doubt bolstered by its box office success at the time. But its politics have weakened its position, and, along with Birth of a Nation, it might not last another decade on such lists. On the flip side, black filmmakers have four films on the list and women directors only one (Meshes of the Afternoon one of the best experimental films of all time). Other interesting choices include The Lion King (the only animated film on the list), Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, and Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (one of two musicals by the director on the list). What films would you like to see added or taken away? Is this a fair assessment of America’s worth? Let us know in the comments. Above, you can watch a somewhat idiosyncratic presentations of the films on the BBC list. Related Content: The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. The Top 100 American Films of All Time, According to 62 International Film Critics is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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