Map of Booger Canyon, Arizona and 58,713 other USGS DRG Maps

If you’ve been nosing around the Web looking for free maps, the Archive’s new collection of nearly sixty thousand digital raster graphic (DRG) maps from the USGS is nothing to sneeze at. These maps are in the public domain, but getting access to them usually costs money. The Archive provides them for free thanks to the work of Jared Benedict of the Libre Map Project and donations from over 100 map liberators. For best results, the maps should be viewed with global positioning software or a map viewer.

A few examples:

Nose Rock, New Mexico
Roman Nose, Idaho
Blue Nose Peak, Nevada
The Nose East, Wyoming
Devils Nose, California

– Renata

The Archive Cooks!

We have lots of cooking shows on the archive, but some are more entertaining than others.

My current favorite is Cibi Alterati, in Italian with English subtitles. They’ll (sort of) teach you to make Polenta with Ragu, Pasta Puttanesca, and Salad Dressing. In costumes, and with live musical guests.

Some other interesting choices include Cooking in the Nude, the Trailer Park Cooking Show with Jolene Sugarbaker, Cooking With Love Makes Pozole, an unneccesarily dangerous method for cooking sausage, and Cooking With Tom where he teaches you how to make napalm (not really).

If you’d like to learn how to actually cook something, try one of these:

• Bianca makes Struesel Cake (see her other videos too)
  
• Mum’s “Boiled” Chocolate Cake
• Chicken and Artichoke Hearts (more cooking videos by Ralph Riccardi)
• Homemade Gnocchi
• Don’t Come the Raw Prawn

If you’d like to see more cooking shows, do a search for keyword “cooking” on archive.org.

– Alexis

A Little Piano Music & Music for A Little Piano

As days grow shorter and winter evenings stretch out ever longer, the contemplative voice of a solo piano can be quite soothing. The Archive has some wonderful selections to accent tea or wine-sipping evenings spent at home:

• Michael Nyman performs two pieces from the soundtrack for “The Piano”.
• These arrangements by Charles Parker of some well-known songs are quite lovely.
• This not so frantic “Frantic Piano” is an original arrangement by an Archive member.
• Hear the premiere performance of Alan Hovhaness’ Sonata for Piano “Ananda” , Op. 303 (click part II).
• 12 etudes by the very young Chopin are performed by Cecile Licad at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In addition to more traditional piano music, the Archive has a number of recordings of music for toy piano performed by Len Tan and presented by Other Minds:

• An arrangement of Eleanor Rigby for toy piano.
• John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano.
• Toby Twining’s compositions Nightmare Rag and Satie Blues combine toy with standard piano.

Enjoy!

– Renata

Robert Altman’s early career

Robert Altman has died at 81.

He began his career working at Kansas City, Missouri’s famed industrial film factory, the Calvin Company. As one of the Archive’s knowledgeable posters, “Mr.,” states, he made a number of sponsored films before his first feature, The Delinquents.

The Magic Bond, his 1955 film for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, is downloadable from the Archive. Does the first sequence remind you of a certain movie about the Korean War?

Santa’s Message to Good Boys and Girls

We ran across some videos today transmitted directly to the Archive from Santa himself. Check to see if you’ve got a message waiting!

Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, you’ll enjoy these movies as well:

• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
  
• Santa Claus’s Punch and Judy
• AVisit to Santa

Or, if you’re in the mood for something bizarre, try Santa Crazy!

– Alexis

Poetry on the Archive

Audio

• Love Letters Unsent to People Unmet by John Robinson
• A prayer by Jeremy Young

Texts

• Our Holidays in Poetry compiled by Mildred P. Harrington and Josephine H. Thomas in 1929
• Twentieth Century American Poetry
• The Spider’s Tongue by Jim Barrett, poetry and stories written while travelling

Videos

• Icons of Black Poetry, iconic poems read by 4th graders and acommpanied by images of their artwork
• Tatlin, a puppet animation of the life & work of Vladimir Tatlin, the constructivist artist, with an accompanying poem by Velimir Khlebnikov.

– Alexis

This Week in History

This week in 1933 the US established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Oklahoma became the 46th state in 1907 (see this Encyclopedia Britannica educational film from 1942 to learn more about OK, “land of the red men”), Burgess Meredith was born in 1908 (listen to Pepper Young’s Family starring Meredith), in 1873, W. C. Handy, the American composer known as the “father of the blues,” was born (listen to a version of his song “St. Louis Blues“), and the first Polaris A-Submarine was launched in 1960 (bringing “90% of Russia’s major cities within striking range”). If you prefer live music, listen to any of these 90 live concerts recorded on November 16th throughout the years.

 – Alexis

Blues on the Archive

Today I ran across a great show from 1955 called Rhythm and Blues Revue with performances by Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway and Bill Bailey, among others. My favorite moment in the video comes about halfway through while Sarah Vaughan is singing “Perdido.” The camera pans over to the drummer who is obviously being forced to wear a ridiculously ruffly calypso shirt, and the look on his face is just priceless. The other highlight for me is Nat King Cole singing “Calypso Blues” about 3/4 of the way through.

I started looking around for some other good blues performances on the Archive, and found this gem as well: Eva Cassidy Live at Blues Alley.

A few other items you might enjoy:

• “Middle Class Blues” by A Band Named Brian
• Little Wolves doing “Karaoke Kid”
• EL84 performing “You Left Me”

– Alexis

Machinima Movies

Machinima movies are made with real-time, 3D virtual environments, often appropriated from existing video game engines. The Archive has hundreds of machinima videos in the Machinima Collection, but here are a few of our favorites:

• The Snow Witch
• Look Over Here
• Star Wars A Clone Apart Episode 1
• Red vs. Blue Episode 9 (some strong language) - more episodes

– Alexis

Remembering Sid Davis

Sid Davis, chronicler of childhood menace and jeopardy, has died at 90.

Sid was one of the most distinctive independent filmmakers who entered the nontheatrical film field following World War II. Throughout his career, he expressed concern for the safety and wellbeing of children and teenagers, making some 150 films (the exact total is hard to determine) that rank among the most compelling cautionary works of the 20th century. Though he was a Hollywood insider and worked as John Wayne’s stand-in, he was a self-taught filmmaker, and his films look quite unlike anyone else’s.
There are 25 of his films online at the IA.

His obituary is here and here, and a Metafilter post here.