Arts and Culture

Chloe Jackson was asked to create a lyric video for Tom Rosenthal’s wonderful song, ‘Don’t Die Curious’. And she delivered. Enjoy… 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.  Related Content: Bob Marley’s Redemption Song Finally Gets an Official Video: Watch the Animated Video Made Up of 2747 Drawings Watch “The Stroke,” a Hand-Animated Music Video Where the Visuals Came First & the Improvised Music Second Watch  Tom Waits For No One , the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979 Don’t Die Curious: An Animated Lyric Video is a post from: Open Culture . Fo

Sitting or standing before an esteemed writer’s desk can make us feel closer to their process. Virginia Woolf’s desks — plywood boards she held on her lap and sloped standing desks — show a kind of austere rigor in her posture. “Throughout her life as a writer,” James Barrett points out , Woolf “paid attention to the physical act of writing,” just as she paid attention to the creative act of walking . The bareness of her implements tells us a lot about her as an artist, but it tells us nothing about the state of writing desk technology available in her time. 20th century modernist Woolf preferred the 16th-century rustic simplicity of Monk’s house . Had she been an 18th century aristocrat and a follower of fashion, she might have availed herself of a desk designed by the Roentgens , the “principal cabinetmakers of the ancien régime ,” notes the Metropolitan Museum of Art . “From about 1742 to its closing in the early 1800s, the Roentgens’ innovative designs were combined with

In his films, Andrei Tarkovsky shows us things no other auteur does: an unbroken eight-minute shot, for example, of a man slowly walking a lit candle across an empty pool, starting over again whenever the flame goes out. One of the best-known (or at least most often mentioned) sequences in the Russian master’s oeuvre, it comes from Nostalghia , a late picture made during his final, exiled years in Italy. Some cite it as an example of all that’s wrong with Tarkovsky’s cinema; others as an example of all that’s right with it. But both the criticism and the praise are rooted in the director’s heightened sensitivity to and deliberate use of time — a resource about which we’ve all come to feel differently after a year of global pandemic. “Our sense of time during the pandemic was just as warped as our sense of space,” says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his new video essay above , a follow-up to his previous exploration of how lockdowns turned cities around the wor

The idea that the world maps are wrong — all of them — is hardly controversial. It’s a mathematical fact that turning a globe (or an  oblate spheroid ) into a two-dimensional object will result in unavoidable distortions. In the TED-Ed lesson above by Kayla Wolf, you’ll learn a brief history of world maps, starting all the way back with the Greek mathematician Ptolemy , who “systematically mapped the Earth on a grid” in 150 AD in order to create maps that had a consistent scale. His grid system is still in use today — 180 lines of latitude and 360 lines of longitude. Most of the world maps we knew come from the Mercator Projection, “a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569,” writes Steven J. Fletcher . This map projection is practical for nautical applications due to its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians…. th

For Passover 2021, the culture nonprofit Reboot has released “a modern day score to Cecil B. Demille’s 1923 classic silent film The Ten Commandments with Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Steven Drozd (Flaming Lips) and Scott Amendola.” Reboot writes: “Berlin, Drozd and Amendola created a momentous new score for the Exodus tale, musically following Moses out of Egypt and into the Dessert where he receives the Ten Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille’s first attempt at telling the Ten Commandments story was in the Silent era year of 1923. The film [ now in the public domain ] is broken up into two stories: the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and a thinly related ‘present day’ melodrama.” Enjoy it all above. via BoingBoing Related Content: Watch the German Expressionist Film, The Golem, with a Soundtrack by The Pixies’ Black Francis Public Domain Day Is Finally Here!: Copyrighted Works Have Entered the Public Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Perfo

I always think tattoos should communicate. If you see tattoos that don’t communicate, they’re worthless. —Henk Schiffmacher, tattoo artist Tattooing is an ancient art whose grip on the American mainstream, and that of other Western cultures, is a comparatively recent development. Long before he took up — or went under — a tattoo needle, legendary tattoo artist and self-described “very odd duck type of guy,”  Henk Schiffmacher  was a fledgling photographer and accidental collector of tattoo lore. Inspired by the immersive approaches of Diane Arbus and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Schiffmacher,  aka  Hanky Panky, attended tattoo conventions, seeking out any subculture where inked skin might reveal itself in the early 70s. As he shared with fellow tattooer  Eric Perfect  in a characteristically rollicking, profane  interview , his instincts became honed to the point where he “could smell” a tattoo concealed beneath clothing: The kind of tattoos you used to see in those days,