Arts and Culture

Paris is named after the Parisii, a tribe of Celts who settled on a very strategic island in the middle of the Seine sometime around 250 BC. With a wall and two bridges in and out, the settlement grew and--though conquered by Romans, and threatened by all sorts including Attila the Hun--it evolved into the city of romance and revolution. This fascinating fly-through of Paris circa 1550 AD shows a city in transition. Still very much a medieval town in certain respects, it already has many of the landmarks tourists flock to even now. It begins just outside the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés , founded in the 6th Century, and goes down the Seine towards the Palais de la Cité, and under the Pont Saint-Michel. Houses were built along the bridges like this until the 18th and 19th centuries. There’s time to linger on Notre Dame cathedral, and to note that the famed flèche, the spire that was lost in 2019’s fire, had yet to be built. (There is debate in the comments about whether th...

The actor, comedian, director, and medieval historian Terry Jones passed away last week, but Mr. Creosote will never die. Nor will any of the other characters portrayed by Jones in his work with Monty Python, the culture-changing comedy troupe he co-founded with Eric Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, and Terry Gilliam. You can get a sense of Jones' range as a comedic performer in the three-minute compilation above , which features a range of Jones' characters including the crunchy frog-dealing candy-shop owner, the aviator-helmeted Spanish Inquisitor, one of the four Yorkshiremen, and of course, the Bishop. My own introduction to Jones' work came through the Spam waitress, a Monty Python character beloved of many children not yet born when Monty Python's Flying Circus , the troupe's BBC series, first ran in the late 1960s and early 70s. Set in a diner where nearly every dish involves Spam as at least one ingredient, the sketch pokes fun a...

Taschen, the publisher of beautiful art books, is running its biannual warehouse sale through Sunday, February 2. This gives you the chance to buy books at nicely discounted prices --anywhere from 25% to 75% off.  Notable picks include Salvador Dali's cookbook and wine guide , Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings 1909–1918 , The Art of Burning Man , and Art Record Covers (which we recently featured on our site ). Find the complete list of discounted titles here . Note : Taschen is a partner with Open Culture. So if you purchase a book, it benefits not just you and Taschen. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site . It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook  and   Twitter ...

Hope you enjoy your weekend... Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site . It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook  and   Twitter  and  sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.  via Twisted Sifter Related Content: A History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs Italian Street Musician Plays Amazing Covers of Pink Floyd Songs, Right in Front of the Pantheon in Rome Iconic Songs Played by Musicians Around the World: “Stand by Me,” “Redemption Song,” “Ripple” & More   Crowd Breaks into Singing Bon Jovi in the Park: The Power of Music in 46 Seconds is a post from: Open Culture . Follow us on Facebook , Twitter , and Google Plu...

In movies like Seven Samurai and High and Low , director Akira Kurosawa took the cinematic language of Hollywood and improved on it, creating a vigorous, muscular method of visual storytelling that became a stylistic playbook for the likes of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. In movies like Ikiru , The Bad Sleep Well   and   The Lower Depths , Kurosawa relentlessly struggled to find the rays of light among the shadows of the human soul. This philosophical urgency combined with his visual brilliance is what gives his work, especially his early films, such vitality. “One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn’t just make a masterpiece or two masterpieces,” Coppola said during an interview. “He made eight masterpieces.” So when Kurosawa comes out with a recommended viewing list, movie mavens everywhere should take note. Such a list was published in his posthumously published book Yume wa tensai de aru (A Dream is a Genius) . His...

Most U.S. readers come to know Evelyn Waugh as the “serious” writer of the saga Brideshead Revisited (and inspirer of the 1981 miniseries adaptation). This was also the case in 1954, when Charles Rolo wrote in the pages of The Atlantic that the novel “sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh’s other books put together.” Yet “among the literary,” Waugh’s name evokes “a singular brand of comic genius… a riotously anarchic cosmos, in which only the outrageous can happen—and when it does happen is outrageously diverting.” The comic Waugh’s imagination “runs to… appalling and macabre inventions,” incorporating a “lunatic logic.” The sources of that imagination now reside at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, who hold Waugh’s manuscripts and 3,500-volume library. The novelist, the Ransom Center notes , “was an inveterate collector of things Victorian (and well ahead of most of his contemporaries in this regard). Undoubtedly the single most ...

No photograph symbolizes American victory more recognizably than Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning  Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima . Taken on February 23, 1945, it shows six U.S. Marines raising their country's flag during the battle — a bloody one even by the standards of the Second World War — for control of that Japanese island. The Soviet Union had an equivalent image: Yevgeny Khaldei's   Raising a Flag over the Reichstag , which shows a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag on the roof of the former German parliament on May 2, 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. The similarities are obvious, but the difference isn't: the Soviet photo was faked. To be more specific, Khaldei's picture was "staged," and "parts of it were altered before it was published." So says Vox's Coleman Lowndes in the video above , which reveals all the pre-Photoshop image manipulation — a specialty of Soviet propagandists even then —  performed on Rais...