CULTURE

What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grate­ful Dead at the Fill­more West? In what world could such a thing hap­pen? In the world of the late sixties/early sev­en­ties, when jazz fused with acid rock, acid rock...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd8XvYRFN-U A Com­plete Unknown, the new movie about Bob Dylan’s rise in the folk-music scene of the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties and sub­se­quent elec­tri­fied break with it, has been praised for not tak­ing exces­sive lib­er­ties, at least by the stan­dards of pop­u­lar...

In 1581, the medieval car­tog­ra­ph­er and Protes­tant the­olo­gian Hein­rich Bünt­ing cre­at­ed a sym­bol­ic map of the world that adorned his book Itin­er­ar­i­um Sacrae Scrip­turae (Trav­el Through Holy Scrip­ture). Hand-col­ored and shaped like a three-leaf clover, the map put Jerusalem at...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NobihsLsZ0 Ide­al­ly, a view­er should be able to iden­ti­fy the work of a par­tic­u­lar auteur from any one scene that the auteur has direct­ed. In real­i­ty, it’s not always pos­si­ble to do so, even in the work of film­mak­ers with...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBJhRvU5BGU Nowa­days musi­cians can reach hun­dreds, thou­sands, some­times mil­lions of lis­ten­ers with a few, usu­al­ly free, online ser­vices and a min­i­mal grasp of tech­nol­o­gy. That’s not to say there aren’t still eco­nom­ic bar­ri­ers aplen­ty for the strug­gling artist, but true...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOGhAV-84iI The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo Bertrand Rus­sell, the great British philoso­pher and social crit­ic, appeared on the BBC pro­gram Face-to-Face in 1959 and was asked a clos­ing ques­tion: What would you tell a gen­er­a­tion liv­ing 1,000 years from now about the life you’ve lived...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI15W-BBhrw In the video above, Lau­rie Ander­son describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion, giv­en that it con­tains an emper­or, sen­a­tors, and ora­tors, though Cavafy him­self said that none...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpjaqInMlak Through­out the years, we’ve fea­tured per­for­mances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large ama­teur choir from Toron­to that meets week­ly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgar­den’s “Black Hole Sun” (to hon­or Chris Cor­nell), and Pat­ti Smith’s “Peo­ple...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgrIC3lcvbE 1939 is wide­ly con­sid­ered the great­est year in Hol­ly­wood his­to­ry. Back then, writes 1939: The Year in Movies author Tom Flan­nery, the so-called “Big Eight” major Amer­i­can stu­dios “had a com­bined 590 actors, 114 direc­tors and 340 writ­ers under...