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Tuesday, October 17th, 2017
- The Autopsy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal, 2016) "Visceral horror to rival Alien and early Cronenberg"
- The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
- The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
- Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)
- Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004) "Snyder’s zombies are, it seems to me: fast moving terrorists who never quit."
- Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 1999)
- The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
- Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971) "His most inventive film, and stripped to the very core."
- Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) "He out-Hitchcocked Hitchcock."
- Final Destination (James Wong, 2000)
- Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997) "Basically a Lovecraftian terror tale in outer space with a The Quatermass Experiment vibe, done by the Brits."
- The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986 and Dave Meyers, 2007) "Rutger Hauer in the original will never be topped, but this is that rarity, a reimagining that actually works."
- The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009)
- The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)
- Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) "The horror here is pretty understated, until the very end."
- The Ruins (Carter Smith, 2008)
- Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)
- Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1986)
- Stir of Echoes (David Koepp 1999) "An unsettling exploration of what happens when an ordinary blue-collar guy (Kevin Bacon) starts to see ghosts."
- The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008)
- Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) As far as "British horror (wrapped in an SF bow), you can’t do much better."
- The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)
| Time | Event |
| 11:00a | The Boston Public Library Will Digitize & Put Online 200,000+ Vintage Records
It may be a great irony that our age of cultural destruction and—many would argue—decline also happens to be a golden age of preservation, thanks to the very new media and big data forces credited with dumbing things down. We spend ample time contemplating the losses; archival initiatives like The Great 78 Project, like so many others we regularly feature here, should give us reasons to celebrate. In a post this past August, we outlined the goals and methods of the project. Centralized at the Internet Archive—that magnanimous citizens’ repository of digitized texts, recordings, films, etc.—the project contains several thousand carefully preserved 78rpm recordings, which document the distinctive sounds of the early 20th century from 1898 to the late-1950s. Thanks to partners like preservation company George Blood, L.P. and the ARChive of Contemporary Music, we can hear many thousands of records from artists both famous and obscure in the original sound of the first mass-produced consumer audio format. Just a few days ago, the Internet Archive announced that they would be joined in the endeavor by the Boston Public Library, who, writes Wendy Hanamura, “will digitize, preserve” and make available to the public “hundreds of thousands of audio recordings in a variety of historical formats,” including not only 78s, but also LP’s and Thomas Edison’s first recording medium, the wax cylinder. “These recordings have never been circulated and were in storage for several decades, uncatalogued and inaccessible to the public.” The process, notes WBUR, “could take a few years,” given the sizable bulk of the collection and the meticulous methods of the Internet Archive’s technicians, who labor to preserve the condition of the often fragile materials, and to produce a number of different versions, “from remastered to raw.” The object, says Boston Public Library president David Leonard, is to “produce recordings in a way that’s interesting to the casual listener as well as to the hard-core music listener in the research business.” Thus far, only two recordings from BPL’s extensive collections have become available—a 1938 recording called “Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy (I Like Mountain Music)” by W. Lee O’Daniel and His Hillbilly Boys and Edvard Grieg’s only piano concerto, recorded by Freddy Martin and His Orchestra in 1947. Even in this tiny sampling, you can see the range of material the archive will feature, consistent with the tremendous variety the Great 78 Project already contains. While we can count it as a great gain to have free and open access to this historic vault of recorded audio, it is also the case that digital archiving has become an urgent bulwark against total loss. Current recording formats instantly spawn innumerable copies of themselves. The physical media of the past existed in finite numbers and are subject to total erasure with time. “The simple fact of the matter,” archivist George Blood tells the BPL, “is most audiovisual recordings will be lost. These 78s are disappearing left and right. It is important that we do a good job preserving what we can get to, because there won’t be a second chance.” Related Content: BBC Launches World Music Archive Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Boston Public Library Will Digitize & Put Online 200,000+ Vintage Records 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.  |
| 2:00p | Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: No Spoilers
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 time in my life when I quit a horror movie in the middle because I was too scared to go on." The movie on King's bootleg tape ("How did I get the bootleg? Never mind how I got it") was The Blair Witch Project, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's ultra-low-budget horror picture that sent shockwaves through the independent film world at the end of the millennium. Though nobody seems to talk much about it anymore, let alone watch it, King's appreciation has endured: he wrote the essay about it quoted here in 2010, and you can read it in full at Bloody Disgusting. That same site has also published a list of fifteen horror movies King has personally recommended, Blair Witch and beyond. The list below combines King's picks at Bloody Disgusting, which lean toward recent films, with a different selection of favorites, with a stronger focus on classics, published just last month at the British Film Institute. "I am especially partial – this will not surprise you – to suspense films," the author of Carrie, Cujo, and It writes by way of introduction," but "my favorite film of all time – this may surprise you — is Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s remake of the great Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. Some may argue that the Clouzot film is better; I beg to disagree." Though clearly a movie fan, King also shows a willingness to advocate where many a cineaste fears to tread, for instance in his selection of not just Sorcerer but several other remakes besides (and in the case of The Hitcher, both the remake and the original). He even chooses the 2004 Dawn of the Dead — directed by no less an object of critical scorn than Zack Snyder — over the 1978 George A. Romero original. But then, King has always seemed to pride himself in his understanding of and rootedness in unpretentious, working class America, which you can see in his novels, the various film adaptations of his novels that have come out over the years, and the sole movie he wrote and directed himself: 1986's Maximum Overdrive, about machines turning against their human masters at a North Carolina truck stop. King now describes that project as a "moron movie," but as he clearly understands, even a moron movie can make a powerful impact. Related Content: Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers Martin Scorsese Names the 11 Scariest Horror Films Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers The Daily Habits of Famous Writers: Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King & More Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: No Spoilers 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. |
| 5:01p | An Animated Introduction to Michel de Montaigne
Considered the first great humanist essayist, Michel de Montaigne was also the first to use the word “essay” for the casual, often meandering, frequently first-person explorations that now constitute the most prevalent literary form of our day. "Anyone who sets out to write an essay,” notes Anthony Gottlieb in The New York Times, “for a school or college class,” a magazine, newspaper, Tumblr, or otherwise, “owes something” to Montaigne, the French “magistrate and landowner near Bordeaux who retired temporarily from public life in 1570 to spend more time with his library and to make a modest memento of his mind.” Montaigne's resulting book, called the Essais—"trials” or “attempts”—exemplifies the classical and Christian preoccupations of the Renaissance; he dwelt intently on questions of character and virtue, both individual and civic, and he constantly refers to ancient authorities, the companions of his book-lined fortress of solitude. “Somewhat like a link-infested blog post,” writes Gottlieb, “Montaigne’s writing is dripping with quotations.” But he was also a distinctly modern writer, who skewered the overconfidence and blind idealism of ancients and contemporaries alike, and looked with amusement on faith in reason and progress. For all his considerable erudition, Montaigne was “keen to debunk the pretensions of learning,” says Alain de Botton in his introductory School of Life video above. An “extremely funny” writer, he shares with countryman François Rabelais a satirist's delight in the vulgar and taboo and an honest appraisal of humanity’s checkered relationship with the good life. Though we may call Montaigne a moralist, the description should not imply that he was strictly orthodox in any way—quite the contrary. Montaigne’s ethics often defy the dogma of both the Romans and the Christians. He strenuously opposed colonization, for example, and made a sensible case for cannibalism as no more barbarous a practice than those engaged in by 16th century Europeans.
In a contrarian essay, “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die”—its title a quotation from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations—Montaigne threads the needle between memento mori high seriousness and offhand witticism, writing, “Let the philosophers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is pleasure. It amuses me to rattle in their ears this word, which they so nauseate to hear.” But in the next sentence, he avows that we derive pleasure “more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever.” The greatest benefit of practicing virtue, as Cicero recommends, is "the contempt of death," which frees us to live fully. Montaigne attacks the modern fear and denial of death as a paralyzing attitude. Instead, “we should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go,” he breezily suggests. “The deadest deaths are the best.... I want death to find me planting cabbages." The irreverence he brought to the gravest of subjects—making, for example, a list of sudden and ridiculous deaths of famous people—serves not only to entertain but to edify, as de Botton argues above in an episode of his series “Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness.” Montaigne “seemed to understand what makes us feel bad about ourselves, and in his book tries to make us feel better." He endeavors to show, as he wrote in his first essay, "that men by various means arrive at the same end." Like later first-person philosophical essayists Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Montaigne addresses our feelings of inadequacy by reminding his readers how thoroughly we are governed by the same irrational passions, and subject to the same fears, conceits, and ailments. There is much wisdom and comfort to be found in Montaigne’s essays. Yet he is beloved not only for what he says, but for how he says it—with a style that makes him seem like an eloquent, brilliant, practical, and self-deprecatingly sympathetic friend. Related Content: An Animated Introduction to Goethe, Germany’s “Renaissance Man” 6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Animated Introduction to Michel de Montaigne 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. |
| 8:00p | A-ha Performs a Beautiful Acoustic Version of Their 1980s Hit, “Take on Me”: Recorded Live in Norway
When the Norwegian synthpop band A-ha recorded "Take on Me" in 1984, the song didn't meet instant success. It took recording two different versions of the track, and releasing it three separate times, before the song managed to climb the charts, peaking at #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the UK Singles Chart. Since then, the song has enjoyed a pretty fine afterlife. It has clocked nearly 500 million plays on YouTube. You'll find it on countless 1980s anthologies and playlists. And now you can watch an entirely new performance of the song, which has already gone viral on YouTube. Recorded this past June in Norway, as part of an unplugged concert for MTV, this version is more subtle and melancholy than the original. And, as many Youtube commenters readily note, it's rather beautiful. Find more details about the performance on A-ha's website. 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: New Order’s “Blue Monday” Played with Obsolete 1930s Instruments 1980s Metalhead Kids Are All Right: New Study Suggests They Became Well-Adjusted Adults All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music A-ha Performs a Beautiful Acoustic Version of Their 1980s Hit, “Take on Me”: Recorded Live in Norway 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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