Arts and Culture

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A quick heads up: Led Zeppelin's 2007 reunion at London's O2 Arena is now streaming free ... for the next two days. Writes Jambase: "Founding members vocalist  Robert Plant , guitarist  Jimmy Page  and multi-instrumentalist  John Paul Jones  shared the stage that night for the first time since 1995.  Jason Bonham , the son of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, was behind the kit for the 16-song performance.  Celebration Day , the concert film and live album documenting the one-off reunion, was released in 2012." Stream it above (or on Zeppelin's YouTube channel .) Find the setlist below. Good Times Bad Times 0:01:43 Ramble On 0:04:54 Black Dog 0:10:38 In My Time Of Dying 0:16:31 For Your Life 0:28:22 Trampled Under Foot 0:35:17 Nobody's Fault But Mine 0:42:17 No Quarter 0:49:16 Since I've Been Loving You 0:58:41 Dazed and Confused 1:07:04 Stairway To Heaven 1:18:58 The Song Remains The Same 1:27:47 Misty Mountain Hop 1:...

The portrait is your mirror. It’s you. — August Sander A picture is worth a thousand words, and compelling portraits that speak eloquently to a critical moment in history often earn many more than that. Author J ohn Green ’s thoughtful  Art Assignment  investigation into  Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance ,  August Sanders ’ 1914 photograph, taps into our need to interpret what we’re looking at. The descriptive title (the piece is alternatively referred to as  Young Farmers ) offers some clues, as does the date. The subjects’ youth and location—a remote village in the German Westerwald—suggest, correctly as it turns out, that they would soon be bound for what Green terms “another dance,” WWI. Green has learned far more about the people in his favorite photo since he covered it in a 2-minute segment for his  vlogbrothers  channel below. Much of the shorter video’s narration carries over to the Art Assignment script, but this time, ...

For nearly thirty years, the work of Quentin Tarantino has inspired copious discussion among movie fans. Some of the most copious discussion, as well as some of the most insightful, has come from no less avid a movie fan than Tarantino himself. Every cinephile has long since known that the man who made  Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction , and  Jackie Brown — and more recently pictures like  Django Unchained , The Hateful Eight , and  Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood — is one of their own. Now the subject of numerous video essays , Tarantino could, in another life, have become that medium's foremost practitioner. In the Now You See It video essay above , we have the next best thing: an analysis of Tarantino's work narrated, for the most part, by the man himself. "It's as if a couple of movie-crazy young Frenchmen were in a coffee house, and they've taken a banal American crime novel and they're making a movie out of it based not on the novel, but on the poe...

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the theater felt we were witness to the beginning of a new era of cinematically and philosophically ambitious action movies. Whether that era delivered on its promise — and indeed, whether  The Matrix 's own sequels delivered on the franchise's promise — remains a matter of debate. More than twenty years later, the film's black-leather-and-sunglasses aesthetic may date it, but its visual effects somehow don't. The Fame Focus video above takes a close look at two examples of how the creators of  The Matrix combined traditional, "practical" techniques with then-state-of-the-art digital technology in a way that kept the result from going as stale as, in the movies, "state-of-the-art digital technology" usually has a way of guaranteeing. By now we've all seen revealed the mechanics of "bullet time," an effect that astonished  The Matrix 's early audiences by seeming nearly to freeze time...

The concept of generations, as we currently use the term, would have made no sense to people living throughout most of human history. “Before the 19th century,” writes Sarah Leskow at The Atlantic , “generations were thought of as (generally male) biological relationships within families—grandfathers, sons, grandchildren and so forth.” The word did not describe common traits shared by, “as one lexicographer put it in 1863, ‘all men living more or less at the same time.’” The theory was thoroughly ingested into mass culture, as anyone can tell from social media wars and the fixations of newspaper columnists. One such correspondent weighed in a few years ago with a contrarian take: “Your generational identity is a lie,” wrote Philip Bump at The Washington Post in 2015. (He makes an exception for Baby Boomers, for reasons you’ll have to read in his column.) All this debunking is to the good. While scholars routinely investigate the origins of contemporary ideas, too often the r...

According to film theorist David Bordwell, there was a major change in acting styles in the 1940s. Gone was the “behavioral acting” style of the 1930s (the first full decade of sound film), where mental states were demonstrated not just through the face, but through body movement, and how actors just held themselves. Instead, in the 1940s there is a “new interiority, a kind of neutralization, of the acting performance, that’s intense, almost silent film-style.” Part of this is due to increasingly convoluted, psychological narratives, including lots of voice-overs. Some of it was also due to studios hoping to achieve the psychological depth of novel writing. In short, whatever the reasons in the 1940s, we got to watch characters think. In Nerdwriter’s latest video essay, Evan Puschak examines the icon of 1940s male acting: Humphrey Bogart, whose skill and opportunity placed him at the right place and the right time for such a shift in styles. Think of Bogart and you think of ...