CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLD28a1Pdk0 “This is sup­posed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip includ­ed in the Biog­ra­phy tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above. He then gives the fin­ger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyPe1Jahyfo Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel report­ed­ly car­ried rocks in their pock­ets dur­ing the pre­miere of their first film Un Chien Andalou, antic­i­pat­ing a vio­lent reac­tion from the audi­ence. It was a fair con­cern. The movie might be almost 90 years...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv36XkQojM The can­cel­la­tion of The Late Show with Stephen Col­bert—CBS insists it was pure­ly a “finan­cial deci­sion,” the result of declin­ing ad rev­enue in late night tele­vi­sion. Oth­ers see it as a dif­fer­ent kind of “finan­cial deci­sion,” a deci­sion by...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwd9sEwN0Vw It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “Peo­ple who live in glass hous­es should­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or rather glass and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEo3lf0-nxY Some YouTu­ber post­ed online a pret­ty nice clip of an espres­so shot being pulled from a La Mar­zoc­co FB80 espres­so machine at 120 frames per sec­ond. They rec­om­mend mut­ing the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ex7f7KVl3I With the Hal­loween sea­son mere months away, the time has come to start think­ing about what fright­en­ing reads to line up for our­selves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein; or, The Mod­ern Prometheus, a...

For three decades after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, political science and practical politics in Western Europe and North America very rarely addressed Moscow’s efforts to ‘reintegrate’ the ‘post-Soviet space’ (i.e., the former republics of the Union of Soviet...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9gLmBgUTV4 Frank Zap­pa called them the “Moth­ers of Pre­ven­tion,” the group of wives mar­ried to mem­bers of Con­gress who decid­ed in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ con­ser­v­a­tive hys­te­ria. We’ve talked...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB1cEyy0fKs Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed near­ly destroyed his own career with one dou­ble album. Met­al Machine Music sold 100,000 copies dur­ing the three weeks of sum­mer 1975 between its release and its removal from the mar­ket. More...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH07_Lyw05Q Though now in his sev­en­ties, Jack­ie Chan con­tin­ues to appear on the big screen with reg­u­lar­i­ty. For most world-famous actors, that’s hard­ly notable, but it’s not as if Sir John Giel­gud, say, had spent decades film­ing scenes of hand-to-hand...