Arts and Culture

As the weather grows colder, we look for reasons to stay inside, snuggled up under a blanket, steamy mug in hand. Or sometimes we look for an incentive to bundle up and go for a long freezing constitutional. Either way, 40 years’ worth of  Fresh Air,  Peabody award-winning radio journalist  Terry Gross' interview show,  is just the ticket. A complete digital database of over 22,000 segments is now available for your listening pleasure. Feeling overwhelmed? Scroll down on  the home page  to delve into a recent episode. Or dial it back to  one of the earliest extant  installments. (In the first decade of the show’s history, many episodes went untaped or got recorded over.) The massive database, created with help from library scientists at Drexel University , is also searchable  by guest  and  topic . If you feel like handing over the controls, home station  WHYY in Philadelphia  has some suggested collectio...

After their 1986 album Black Celebration , new wave legends Depeche Mode fully committed to being the most gloriously gloomy band next to The Cure to appear on stadium stages. Earnest pleas for tolerance like “People are People” and playfully suggestive vamps like “Master and Servant” gave way to atmospheric dirge-y washes and funereal tempos made for moping, not dancing. The move defined them after their early breakout with an image as a kind of New Romantic boy band. The Depeche Mode of the early 80s was always edgier than most of their peers, even if they looked clean cut and cherubic. They were also more experimental, drawing from Kraftwerk’s deadpan German disco in their minimalist first single “Dreaming of Me” and making industrial pop in Construction Time Again ’s “Everything Counts.” Theirs is a body of work, for better or worse, that launched a hundred darkwave bands decades on, and their very first incarnation may remind indie fans of other lo-fi indie pop artists of ...

An insane conquistador, a dwarf rebellion, cattle auctioneers, ancient cave paintings, flaming oil rigs, televangelism, ski jumping, strongmen, Nicolas Cage: at first glance, the filmography of Werner Herzog may seem willfully bizarre. A closer look, which reveals his films' unusual mixture of fact and fiction delivered through images that lodge permanently in the subconscious, may not dispel that impression. But the prolific Herzog, who has steadily worked in and ever more idiosyncratically defined his own realm of cinema since making his first short  Herakles 57 years ago, is engaged in a consistent venture — or so argues Tom van der Linden in his video essay "The Inner Chronicle of What We Are: Understanding Werner Herzog." "I have always thought of my films as being one big work," Van der Linden quotes Herzog himself as saying. "The characters in this story are all desperate and solitary rebels with no language with which to communicate. Inevit...

Here's a holiday season deal worth mentioning. The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering every course on sale for $60 or less in DVD format , including free shipping (in the US and Canada). Instant video formats go for $40 across the board. The deal lasts through midnight on Black Friday. 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 lifelong learner. They then make the courses available to customers in different formats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Downloads, etc.). The courses are very polished and complete, and they can be quite reasonably priced, especially when they’re on sale, as they are today.  Click here , or on the banner above, to explore the offer. Note : The Great Courses is a partner with Open Culture. So if you purchase a course, it benefits not just you and Great Courses. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider...

Having moved to Korea a couple weeks ago, I won't have the chance to partake this year in the beloved institution of American culture known as Thanksgiving. (Korea has its own Thanksgiving, but it happened two months ago.) Maybe you live in the United States and thus almost certainly have a Thanksgiving dinner of some kind, big or small, coming soon. Or maybe you, like me, live elsewhere in the world, and thus in a place without the same tradition. Either way, you can surely partake this Thanksgiving in the beloved institution of American culture known as the work of William S. Burroughs . Here we have a short film of Burroughs, best known as the author of a body of controversial and experimental literature, including books like  Junky  and  Naked Lunch , shot by Gus Van Sant, best known as the director of films like Good Will Hunting ,  My Own Private Idaho, and  Drugstore Cowboy , the last of which includes a memorable appearance by Bur...

No matter how unfamiliar you may be with the work of Isamu Noguchi, you're likely to have encountered it, quite possibly more than once, in the form of a Noguchi table . Designed in the 1940s for the Herman Miller furniture company (in a catalog that also included the work of George Nelson, Paul László, and Charles Eames of the eponymous chair ), it shows off Noguchi's distinctive aesthetic as well as many of his most acclaimed sculptures, set designs, and public spaces. That aesthetic could only have arisen from a singular artistic life like Noguchi's, which began in Los Angeles where he was born to an American mother and a Japanese father, and soon started crossing back and forth across both the Pacific and the Atlantic: a childhood spent around Japan, schooling and apprenticeship back in the U.S., a Guggenheim Fellowship in Paris, periods of study in China and Japan — and all that before age 30. Now, thanks to the Noguchi Museum , we can take a closer look at not just...

Alice’s Restaurant . It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of  William "Obie" Obanhein , arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting,  "The Runaway,"  that graced a 1958 cover of  The Saturday Evening Post .) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn't over. Not by a long shot. Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with ...